Okay, so we are living in a crisis with our healthcare system. The crisis in modern health care system here in the US is in my view, since my existence. Healthcare costs are at an all time high. We are finding that the average income earner can hardly afford the insurance policy in order to get the prescription that they need to help take care of whatever their physical and emotional needs are. And this is a crisis.

We are now seeing so many that are not getting the medications that they need. And medication is important because we need that to be the piece that gets others to the other side of wellness. So medication is needed. But is that the answer? Can you believe I was blown away at the statistic that the US spent $4.1 trillion in 2022 on health care cost?

That to me is mind blowing. Now, I do understand that we came out of a pandemic. I do understand that we had a lot of illnesses that came from the pandemic. But 4.1 trillion, that is crazy. What we're also seeing is medical debt.

Medical debt is still the number one cause for bankruptcy that is worse than any other developed country in the world. We are here at this summit to talk about ways that we can improve the future of medicine. The future of medicine and how it needs to be more personalized is the key to the new healthcare. And so we are seeing a rise in chronic disease more than ever. Diabetes and heart disease, they make up 75% of all of the illnesses post pandemic.

And we are seeing that number begin to rise. You can read many of the new statistics. And another shocking statistic is by, and this is the CDC. By 2050, which is only 25 years from now, over half of the American population will be obese. So this thought led me to a movie that I watched with my kids.

I've learned a lot through all of the animated films that I saw raising my five children. And the one that continuously comes back in my teaching methods is Wally. Now, this film was more about the trash, right? How we are over consuming and leaving one big mess. But what I take away from it is that we're leaving one big mess of health care.

So if you get into the film, you will find that all of these humans are morbidly overweight. They're obese, they're all writing in carts, they're being handed a milkshake with the touch of a button. They can't stand up, they don't move their bodies. And you know what's interesting? I feel like this is where we're going.

And if we keep going at this rate, we are headed in that direction. So let's talk a little bit about the advantages of AI and this increase in technology that is helping us to perform better in the medical industry. Right now you can go in to see your physician and the good assistant, AI assistant is the new assistant coming in that can break records. They're able to pick up diseases faster today than ever in the history of our life. They can detect something even just before it would even show up on a typical scan.

And this is wonderful. But let's look at the other side of it. It's not so wonderful if our health is declining. So again, going back to that paradox, it is amazing to see these advancements in technology and the advancements that we're seeing and being able to pick up a disease well before the human eye could. But if we are not living well, let's take a look at what would happen on the other side of that as we get to, like Wally's world on the axis where we are not able to stand up, we're not able to take care of ourselves, there is a whole cost issue.

So we can't put a cost on a human being. That is not what I'm here to say is that we must, you know, you know, slow down this process of helping to detect illnesses or chronic diseases well before they come alive. But on the other side of it, we must take drastic measures, very drastic measures to build up our health care before it becomes another disaster. So here's the conscious revolution. Here is where I step in.

So this is where I feel that we must get much stronger in educating our whole population. And it does start with our youth. We must start to educate mindfulness practices. Now we talk about it, now we talk about it in casual conversations. Our physicians are told they need to start educating more mindfulness practices.

It goes well beyond that. This is not something that you can just read a five minute excerpt on, how you meditate and then expect someone to pick up that habit and that become a part of their daily practice. We must educate thoroughly how to start becoming more conscious because the more our technology, technology moves at a rapid pace, right? And we let AI start taking over, the more disassociated we are with ourselves. So the further we get separated from who we are as a human, and it's happening very, very quickly and it's alarming, it's quite scary to me.

So where we must, and this is a must, start educating is how we get back into ourselves. And again, I think it's never too late. We can all learn these skills of consciousness, of mindfulness, but it takes work. We are living in a time that is all about how fast can we perform. We are trying to outperform technology and that's just next to impossible.

So we must step back from technology, step away from it, do a detox. Let's get away from technology and have those breaks. Because otherwise we can get so caught up into the data that we find ourselves burning out, we find ourselves making ourselves sick. I have been there, I'm an entrepreneur. I have done the, you know, working 14, 15 hours a day, 24, seven kind of days.

And we know that that is not healthy. Burnout is a real thing. And in my opinion that is what leads to stress, anxiety, depression, all of these other emotional disorders that my opinion lead to these chronic diseases. There are so many chronic diseases that we can heal ourselves if we took the time to step back, we take deep breaths and we learn to practice getting grounded, being back in nature and returning to life again. And this is what I feel like we are raising right now, is that we're constantly competing and now we're finding ourselves competing, as said with technology.

And that is next to impossible. And that fast paced life, that constant desire to be the first in line, that is not a really healthy approach. And so we must start early in educating our children on how to truly mindfully work or meditate and enjoy life and slow down life. So let's go back to the healthcare strain. We are finding that we have a shortage of medication.

I was blown away at this statistic. I didn't realize that 300 essential medications that we need are in short supply. And so that is that said, here's another one, the geriatrician. So those are those that are working with geriatrics and the aging population. There are roughly around 7,300 practicing right now where we need 30,000.

So you're seeing the professionals moving out of helping to care for our aging population. And our aging population is who needs the most care at these latter stages of their life. And so there are so many statistics and so many avenues in our healthcare system that we can find that we consider it broken. And so we are here at the summit to help bring forward a new way of thinking so that we can revolutionize how we personalize our healthcare. We know that technology alone cannot replace medicine.

Technology cannot replace human connection, the touch, the personalized care, the eye to eye contact. And that most often is what is necessary. I heard a doctor Speaking who was really trying to. She's an emergency room physician and she was trying to herself make the changes within her healthcare system to become more patient minded to where all the client or the patient needed was just to be heard. And so more often than not, if we paused as the physician and listened and made eye contact with the patient, that particular story that she was sharing was that the patient ended up being fine, her blood pressure went down, the fear of having a heart attack or a stroke diminished, and she was able to walk out of the emergency room without any health care concern or medication simply because she was listened to.

Personalization must go beyond data. Now we're moving to the conscious revolution. And this is where we are taking a new model or looking at a whole new model for medicine. And it starts by bringing, as said before, consciousness and awareness, self awareness more into our healthcare system. So now we are talking about mindfulness and preventative care.

So, you know, we need to move out of this reactive state of caring. So we want to, you know, get to it before it actually starts to happen or show up in our life. And I say it, that is disease. Disease. It could be emotional or physical disease, it could be a chronic illness.

But we must start taking proactive measures. This is preventative care. And I know in the work that I do here at Conscious Strong, that is what we are all about, is how can we prevent these chronic diseases to creep up in our clients. And so it starts with mindfulness and truly getting to the heart of mindfulness. So what is mindfulness?

What is consciousness? We have many discussions out there on both of these and consciousness can often be thought of as very esoteric. Not quite sure to get my head around it, because guess what, we are never going to get our head around it. It is not something that we're ever going to learn, master and control. It is what it is.

So consciousness, mindfulness, that is something that goes inward, right? It's introspective work. Now when we're dealing with trauma, when we have clients with trauma or patients that are dealing with trauma, it's a real thing. And we have to, it is imperative that we respectfully move into that territory of trauma with our patients. Because if we go throwing information at someone who has experienced something traumatic in their life, we will talk about that in just a moment.

Then it will have their sympathetic nervous system take over and they will not have one thing to do with you. So it's learning the person in front of you. It is understanding the patient in front of you. How can you start to relate? The only way you can do that is by making it personalized.

AI cannot do that for you. It cannot do it for the client, the patient. We have to, as another human, make the eye contact, understand, and learn how to read the person in front of us so that we can develop that rapport that can help that person not move directly into fight or flight. Sympathetic nervous system. We want them in their parasympathetic nervous system.

We want them to feel at ease, calm, not a rapid heart rate. So do you see where we're going? The only way that can happen is by building a rapport. The only way to build a rapport is by personalizing it. By being present, by being aware, by active listening.

And these are skills that are only available if we have that skill of mindfulness, of consciousness and being present. It is when we are living outside of ourselves that we are caught up in all of the noise that is going on around us. And that includes AI. That includes all of our data on our devices. We must stop and take it inward, move our devices aside when we are dealing with the patient.

And that is a patient of any kind, not just one patient that is dealing with severe trauma. Now, touching on trauma for a moment. I teach this a lot in our work at Conscious Strong is that all of us have experienced trauma. Every single human has experienced trauma. And we all process trauma differently.

So what may seem not very traumatic to one person is extremely traumatic to another person. Childbirth. I've given birth five times. Childbirth is beautiful. It is a beautiful experience, but it's traumatic.

It comes in all different, you know, sorts. I have given natural birth. I have done epidurals. This is just me personally. But it's traumatic.

It's traumatic to our body. It shifts everything. But it's also a beautiful experience. That's just one example. And then when we're dealing with someone that has sexual abuse or physical abuse, that raises it to a whole different level.

How do you start to communicate? Let's take sexual or physical abuse. And these are, you know, very sensitive topics, but we must talk about them. Someone who has experienced sexual abuse very likely is not wanting to step out and feel sexy as he or she walks out into the streets. She is hiding.

She has a lot. He has a lot that they are trying to mask. So what happens, unfortunately, is that we start to put them in the category that is considered unhealthy, maybe then moving into obesity due to the fact that they are trying to overcome or overshadow that time that they were Abused. So I'm touching on some serious topics, but the only way we can get to the core of these topics is to talk about them. The only way that we can find answers to these traumatic experiences is to personalize it.

And that means being present. The only way we can be present is to be mindful, is to be aware and to be conscious. So now moving into everyday consciousness and everyday movement and this is what we facilitate here again at Conscious Strong is how do we start to incorporate this as a lifestyle versus it being something that you must schedule and go plan a time for and go to a class for. Those are wonderful in the beginning. How can we start to incorporate them into daily acts of living where it is at this very moment as I'm speaking to the camera, I feel very focused, I feel very conscious, I feel very aware and most importantly, I feel very self aware.

I'm very self aware that my right leg is crossed over my left leg. I'm very self aware that I use my hands to express myself. I'm very self aware of how I am positioned in my chair. This is how we not voicing, but this is how we must start to practice Every moment that we are living our lives, as we're walking down the streets, as we're actively listening to our partner, as we're actively listening to our child, this is where we see the best results when we can start to incorporate this into our everyday acts of living versus it being. I'm going to my meditation class and then I leave my meditation class.

What I have found that eight times out of 10 is probably the number I usually land on. You revert right back to your habits or ways how you were. Not that they were bad, but we always, the moment we step back out into our life outside of that classroom, we more often are going to go right back into what we know best. And that is a habit. So it is retraining.

The way we move through life, not just in a classroom, but outside of the classroom is most important. And this is where we need to bring this into our healthcare system so that we can better educate this. Because the moment how many of you have been into your practitioner's office with some concern and they talk about it in the doctor's office, they maybe prescribe some medication and then the moment you walk out of the door, or let's also bring in some maybe physical activity, let's a physical therapist or maybe you've had, you know, something chronic with some tendonitis and they give you some exercises to do at the house. And the moment you walk out, you get in your car and you drive away and you're like, wait a minute, what was that exercise I was supposed to do again? Or yeah, what was that I was supposed to take again?

I better go look that up. Or that. This is what I'm talking about, is better educating in the office. So that when we walk out of the door, we're not questioning again. Because the odds are. Are you going to go look at that exercise? Likely not. I would say that moves up to nine out of ten would likely end up doing those exercises. So it starts by bringing the self awareness into the game here. Self awareness, mindfulness, that is what is going to help us overcome this healthcare crisis.

I want to talk a bit about our nervous system and how it plays a role on a surface level to help have a basic understanding of what is going on in our body or in our mind, is that we have a nervous system, our central nervous system, and it's made up of parts. And the ones I'm focusing on in the nervous system will be our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system. And then there's one part of our parasympathetic nervous system that is the vagus nerve. And we're going to touch on that in one moment. And so our sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight.

That is when we're in a constant state of angst, we're anxious, we are overwhelmed and our heart rate is high. That is your sympathetic nervous system taking charge. And if our sympathetic nervous system is always in control, your cortisol levels, we're bringing in a lot here, but that's our stress hormone. That is unhealthy in really high levels. And what in my view, and as many statistics share as well, is that is the cause of many underlying diseases.

The pathway to our parasympathetic nervous system is being calm. And the first approach is our breath, breath work. And so we know in mindfulness work, we hear a lot about breath work, deep breathing and turning that into a practice. And breath work has truly been one of the most challenging exercises because it is an exercise that in all of my 20 plus years of teaching has been the hardest. Our breath is an automatic response and it's a part of our beautiful being.

Unfortunately, we have not been taught well how to use it and how to call upon it in times of need. And that is a lot of the work that again, we do here at Conscious Strong is how do we stop to start to tap into our breath and use it as our free medicine as it is. So breath work. We hear a lot about it in our practices. We know that we need to breathe again.

It's learning how to expand your breath so that it serves you all right. I mentioned the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve to me is one of the most important nerves and part of our parasympathetic nervous system. It is a free floating nerve. It's pretty cool when we are able to access it.

And the way we are able to access that is through these deep breathing exercises. So the more expansive your breath and then accessing it with the anatomy, your muscles, the core of your being, that is when you get a really hefty, good hefty dose of happy hormones. And we'll leave it at that. We have hormones that were then flushing through eyes and that is what gives us that natural high. And it truly is like a drug.

I've seen it over and over with clients where they get that natural rush and they go, wow, I feel so good. That is what has happened is that they tapped their vagus nerve. So vagal therapy is amazing. Movement therapy in conjunction with vagal therapy is what we practice here, which is somatic therapy is a tremendous practice, one of many modalities that can help us access the vagus nerve and balance our nervous system. Now coming to a close, we are going to circle back to the beginning of the topic and that is there is a healthcare crisis and we are here to revolutionize and to look at a different approach as to how we can start to personalize our healthcare.

And conscious revolution is one way where we can start to tap deeper into a more conscious level, a mindful level of building this relationship with our mind and our body. And that is where it begins. And so being a voice to get more of this practice into our healthcare system, bring this practice into our homes, start to educate so that we don't become the access in the Milky Way where Wall E ended up living. So I'm going to leave you with Wall E as your homework, maybe watch that movie because it is quite enlightening looking at it from just the global standpoint of how we are over consuming and leaving trash, not just from a trash perspective, but also trashing our bodies and our minds. And if we don't do something now, we, our future generations are going to suffer.

And that's what we are all here to share, is how we can start to remove suffering and future suffering and helping to personalize our healthcare system. All right, I'm going to leave you with the final thought here, and that is that true health is not about living longer. It's not about winning the race. True health is about thriving in everyday living.