That's how this show was born. We started having all these conversations about taking better care of ourselves and eating healthier and taking rest and meditating and having healthier emotional and spiritual lives, which greatly affects our physical world.

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. This is my lovely co-host Ollie of Olliewood Studios. Got a really good show for you today. Today, I am going to be talking about the second of our seven seeds of the soul.

So for those of you joining us for the first time, these colors represent our teaching curriculum. Today, we are talking about the second one, which is heal. So just to review the seeds go be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. These are going to be chapters in a book that's coming out later this year. So stay tuned.

For right now, you get to hear it first here. Today's topic is heal, which seems kind of appropriate since I'm a physician, right? We're supposed to heal the body. The other thing is I have a funny story to start with. I was on a forum way, way back at the beginning of forums on the internet, like in the mid-2000s era when people were just starting to get the gist of online forums, and Facebook was new and wasn't anything like it is now.

I was in a group chat. I said something about how I was a healer, and they were like no, you're not. I'm a doctor, that's what I do for a living is I heal. I make people better. But what they were talking about was a different context. They had an understanding of being a healer from a spiritual context. I think it's important when we address this topic that we are careful to include both the spiritual and the physical. So we're going to lead with that today.

The first thing I wanted to offer to you is a definition. What does it mean to be healed or to heal? Why am I making this the second seed? So for those of you who haven't seen the first seed episode, it's called be. Like how do you want to be? The first seed is all about your self-care. What are the routines that you want to do? How do you want to show up in this world for yourself and the others that you love? What is your be?

Well, the second seed, heal, is about going the next step further, which is finding the things that are broken and restoring them. That's what it means to heal. So when we think about that, in my office, I'm a GYN surgeon. I do minimally invasive GYN surgery. All day long, I'm looking for the things that are broken, the physical things that are not working in people's bodies.

So in my practice, I do a ton of fibroid surgery. I do hysterectomies. Almost everything I do is robotic, same day surgery, minimally invasive. My whole job is to find what's broken and to do surgery to fix it. Now, do I think that that's the end of the healing process for a patient? By no means. That's only the beginning.

So let's talk a little bit about the process of healing and what that actually means. So the process starts out by noticing or becoming aware of or having an awareness of something being broken or not quite right. That might be something in your body that's not working right. It may be something emotionally that isn't working right. It may be something in your environment or the world that is not working right. But whatever it is, what we're doing is we're focusing our attention and our awareness on what is broken or what is not working the way it should.

Once we've done that, we go through a process. We do it naturally. You do it too, a process of diagnosis. In medicine, we call this a differential diagnosis. A mechanic would call it something different, I think. I have a quick joke about mechanics and GYNs and surgeons. I'm going to mess this one up because I can't tell jokes well.

But what's the difference between a mechanic and a surgeon? Well, we do it, we fix it with the engine running. Very cute. Okay, what's the difference between a mechanic and a GYN surgeon? We do it with the car running, but we do it through the tailpipe. Okay, that's about as inappropriate as I'm ever going to get on this show, but that's those are the only two jokes I know, and they're kind of funny.

So just like a car mechanic would do diagnostics where they're trying to figure out what's not working right in your car, you do the same thing when you have something that doesn't feel right. You know you do. In fact, the first thing that you do like if your shoulder doesn't feel well or something or you feel something's not right in your body, when you become aware of it, what does your mind do? Your mind goes through this little list of all the things that could possibly be, and I'm talking to you. You who go to Google and start looking at the worst case scenario of everything. Then you end up in my office with me going okay, let's figure this out.

So then, as a doctor, what I do is I sit down with a patient, and I'm trying to figure out, what are the possibilities of things going on? What are the most likely things? How do we best approach the scenario? That's called being a diagnostician.

So once I've identified that there's something that needs help with surgery, we book the surgery. We actually take the patient there. We most of the time do it with no narcotic recovery, same day surgery. It's super fun. My whole surgery world is about making surgery easier for women.

Stay tuned for more that at the end of the month. We're coming up on our 10 year anniversary for my practice Virtuosa GYN, by the way. We're going to do a whole segment on what a MIG surgeon is, a minimally invasive GYN surgeon and our 10 years of making surgery easier for women. So I'm super excited by that. That's going to be in a couple of weeks.

Okay, back to the fixing the patient. So we'll go to the operating room. My job as a surgeon is to have the correct diagnosis, but also know what to do once I get inside the patient. I always say surgery is just like Christmas. You can do all the diagnostic testing, the labs, and all that. You think you know what's going on, but you never really know until you get in there. Then that's when the fun part of surgery begins because it's a very creative endeavor where we're going and fixing people.

So we get them through the surgery, but that is not the end of the process. Just like you would go through a process for your car being broken or having an emotional problem that is a spiritual or an emotional brokenness, the healing is just starting at that point. So without my patients having bodies that are healthy and able to continue the healing process, my surgery is worthless.

In fact, when we see patients that have collagen disorders or auto immune disorders or who are just sicker patients, their bodies have a lot more difficulty healing and a lot more complications. That's the other part of what I deal with in my practice is dealing with the really complicated patients that not everybody else wants to take care of.

So when we're talking about this, in the post-op world when I see my patients after surgery, we start getting into some discussions that have nothing to do with the actual physical surgery that I did myself. We start talking about all of the things in their life and their lifestyle that may be broken and need help in healing.

Out of those conversations, that's how the show was born. We started having all these conversations about taking better care of ourselves and eating healthier and taking rest and meditating and having healthier emotional and spiritual lives, which greatly affects our physical world.

So when I started talking with patients on this level, what we're doing is helping them prevent future physical problems so they don't have to come back to do surgery with me again, hopefully. But then we're also teaching them how to help their bodies, work with their bodies to heal themselves after they leave my office.

Because I started having those conversations again and again and again, we decided to create a whole show about wellness for our patients. That's exactly what The Dr. Crockett Show was born from, and that's where the seven seeds of the soul came from. I started looking at the processes and the conversations that we were having.

So one of the things about our show is our core values, and one of our core values and one of our very strongly held beliefs is that as you help people become the best versions of themselves, which we call our virtuosa selves. A virtuosa is the feminized version of a virtuoso or expert, a master at something. As you become the best version of yourself and heal yourself, we believe that you start to look around and heal the world around you. This is our philosophy about how we make the world a better place.

Just as one person speaking through a camera to you guys, we all are here to encourage each other and to offer up that healing. That core value is something that is at the heart of both my medical practice and The Dr. Crockett Show.

So as we move forward into thinking about the healing process, I mentioned at the beginning of the show, a lot of times people separate out the spiritual or the emotional. I don't mean to imply that those are the same thing. But people separate out the spiritual or the emotional sides of healing from the physical side of healing.

For instance, it's very easy to say oh, there's a broken bone. We need to fix it. It's much harder to say oh, you have a broken heart. We need to fix that. Then even if you can identify something like that then the question becomes well, what tools do we have to help you do that?

I think the important thing here is to realize that there's not just one way. There's not just a go to the doctor and get it fixed kind of way. There's not just a go pop up pill with a prescription kind of way. Although prescription medicines are amazing, and we use them widely to help fix and heal a whole lot of things. But there are only one tool in our tool bucket. I think we need to be more aware of all the other tools that we have at our disposal. Those may be the things that we think of as more intuitive or softer.

If you can be still for a minute and listen to your body, just sit for a minute. Be still and know. There's this Bible verse in there somewhere. There's also a Buddhist saying. That's a theme across many religions because a lot of spiritual teachers teach about being still so that you can have that awareness and settle your body. That, in turn, influences your physical world, both internally and externally.

So I want you to think about the tools that we have for that. So if you sit and be still and learn how to meditate, that's one tool. A lot of you have religious views. We're not a show that teaches a specific religious viewpoint. We respect all religions. But a lot of people pray. Pray is a communication between us and the divine. A communication between what is in our heart and our soul with what is outside of ourselves.

So there are several types of prayer here that are helpful. This comes into play a lot with healing. How often do you see people in the hospital who are sick being prayed for and prayer chains being set up? So the first side is actually praying for a result, that's called a petition prayer.

Well, the other side of prayer, the flip side, is the listening side of prayer. That's what meditation is, or contemplative prayer. So when you're contemplating or being still in receiving, that is another type of healing that you have access to. You have spiritual helpers that within your denomination or your religious field to help you too.

The other thing that's really helpful is to learn to look outside the traditional realms of healing. I have a great respect and an increasing respect for practitioners of Eastern medicine. There's all kinds of ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture, and naturopaths. All kinds of people that have wisdom and knowledge that extends beyond and is different than my understanding of Western medicine.

I think it's just an amazing thing. When you start looking at the plants and the variety of healing that's available in nature, I think it's very arrogant for me to say that my way is the only way, or that the medicines that I have are the only things that help heal people.

So I would encourage you to use your food as a medicine. We teach whole food plant based diet on this show because of the incredible pharmacy and interactive properties of foods. We have lots of videos for you to go back and look. Check out the broccoli episode. That was one of my favorite ones. So I want you to encourage to look around your world and see what is available for you to help heal yourself and also what is available that needs healing around you that you can help heal in the world as well.

This can also be a thought between the divides that are in our world. If you look at our political system, some may say that's broken. If you look at how masculine and feminines are interacting, there's a lot more talk recently about the patriarchy and the matriarchy and feminism and toxic masculinity and all of that.

What I would encourage you to think about is, as the mother of boys who I adore, I want you to think about more about healing the brokenness that those divides and those things that divide us require compassion and patience and healing, and those may be harder to heal than me taking out a fibroid.

So I want you to think about those types of things when you're thinking about healing also. This can go from very micro, from a cellular level, like what can you do to make your telomeres longer so that you live longer? What can you do to increase your mitochondrial health or your cellular health?

Then from that you can continue up into your limbs, your body, your organs, and then your family, your world around you, all the way up to a very meta level with the universe. Think about what your places in it just like Ollie is. He's had enough. He's like okay, mom. That's enough healing.

Actually, I think he's right. This has been a really great topic. Thank you for tuning in today. The third seed that we're going to be talking about on the next seed episode is the pink one, this is love. That's my favorite one. So y'all stay tuned. Have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you next Tuesday. Please make sure to like, subscribe, and share. If you think this was helpful to you, share it with your friends. If you have comments in the, please leave comments in the comment section below. We do read them. I'd love to hear your ideas for more content. Until next week, see you. Love you. Bye.

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.