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A Missionary's Story
146 Plays1 year ago
Holistic Hormone Practitioner Brinnah Hart tells her story of serving a religious mission and the effects it had on her mental and physical health. She shares her journey taking control of her life and health and how she's now helping others.
Her Instagram, Coaching with Hart
The Life Detox is brought to you by Bubble & Bee Organic
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Transcript
Crisis of Faith and Emotional Struggles
00:00:05
Speaker
Today, I'm touching on a subject that I'm honestly a little nervous about. I grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon Church. When I was 22, I had a crisis of faith and was severely depressed. That's when an abuser was able to swoop in and take over my life, and I stopped going to church.
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm a little nervous to bring up my history. What if people see that I was Mormon and don't want to support my company anymore? Or what if they see that I left the church and reject me? But the truth of it is, it's my history and a part of who I am. Today, I wanted to share a story and a perspective that's not often told.
Missionary Life Challenges
00:00:42
Speaker
And that is the emotional and health struggles of an LDS sister missionary.
00:00:47
Speaker
Brenna Hart is sharing her story of her mission, her struggles, and the lessons we can all learn from her experience. My name is Stephanie Greenwood and this is The Life Detox.
00:01:11
Speaker
Brenna never really struggled with her health when she was a teen. I grew up playing soccer competitively so I was very healthy. Health issues were never really a problem for me and going into college I was a very bubbly optimistic person.
00:01:28
Speaker
I had lots of friends. Life was just really great. My freshman year of college, I decided to serve a mission for my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And I got called to Chile, so I was really excited. And so I got there, and my first six months was amazing. And six months in, I started to have a lot of anxiety. Missionary life is not easy.
00:01:53
Speaker
You're in a new place, sometimes a foreign land with limited contact with your family and friends, maybe speaking a new language that you just learned. Your job every day is to approach strangers and are more often than not rejected, sometimes harshly. Pair this rejection with the expectation that this time is supposed to be spiritual and beautiful and it can be a true test of faith. Many times missionaries blame themselves for the disconnect they feel.
00:02:24
Speaker
I attributed this to me not being good enough, which I think a lot of women do. And I just didn't ever ask for help and so the last part of my mission was extremely difficult for me. I was suffering a lot and I just never told anyone because I thought it was my fault.
00:02:40
Speaker
If I'm being completely honest, I prayed a lot during my hardest times and I felt like God was not answering me. On my mission, I would get very upset and ask God to take the pain away. And nothing would happen. With the culture that we live in, it's just this need to be perfect and to put others before ourselves. It's like, forget yourself and go to work.
00:03:06
Speaker
That's what we're told. After serving for 18 to 24 months, missionaries come back home. Adjusting back into life can be strange. I got home from my mission and I kind of thought things would just get better.
Lifestyle Transformation and Health
00:03:20
Speaker
And I also from my mission had a lot of gut issues. So the anxiety and the gut issues were both things I came home with. With any hard thing that people go through,
00:03:28
Speaker
You have a lot of support at the beginning. When you first get home from your mission, everyone is asking, how are you adjusting? But then even a month or so down the road, people just don't mean to, but they just kind of forget. And so I've seen that with me, with other sisters that I've talked to, is that's when the support is needed the most, but we don't always get it.
00:03:49
Speaker
I still didn't tell anyone about my anxiety, but my gut issues, you know, I tried going to doctors. I got medications, but nothing really ever helped. I couldn't look at my mission journal for like a year. It was just too hard for me. I won't say I was mad at God. I was never mad at God because I do have this understanding that everything happens for a reason, but I was mad that I went on a mission because I felt like my life was forever just
00:04:17
Speaker
I was just going to be anxious the rest of my life and depressed. And so when I prayed, I was just mad sometimes. Brina's mom was instrumental in helping her get her life and health back on track. My mom helped me kind of change my lifestyle. So that's kind of the first part is I started to change what I was eating and started to change my lifestyle up. That's what really got me on track.
00:04:40
Speaker
And then I finally told my mom about the anxiety I was having and she is a rock star. I wish everyone could meet my mom, but she helped me get therapy and all of that. And so for a moment, everything was managed, gut was better, anxiety was manageable. And so I kind of just went through the rest of college. Fast forward a couple of years, I met my husband, got engaged, and so I decided to go on birth control. And this is kind of part two of
00:05:06
Speaker
my health journey because it was terrible. It was the worst four months of my life. I won't go into a ton of details, but I needed something to change. And so that's when I started to learn more about hormone health and how important that is. And so I got off with birth control and did fertility awareness. So I just tracked my cycle. I learned how to do that. And that's when I started getting rid of toxic products. And a few months after that, I was starting to feel better again.
00:05:33
Speaker
And then part three, a couple years after that, I was in California with my family and got a concussion boogie boarding. Pretty severe. I had a lot of nausea and a lot of stomach pains again, head pains. This went on for several months and it wasn't actually until a couple months ago that I started learning about nervous system regulation and
00:05:57
Speaker
the vagus
Health Management Techniques
00:05:58
Speaker
nerve. Once I started doing therapy for that is when I really started to feel better from my concussion. So if I combine lifestyle and hormone health and nervous system regulation, that is when I was like, okay, I think I have the recipe for good health and now I want to share it with the world.
00:06:17
Speaker
Brenda went through training to become a certified health coach and is a holistic hormone practitioner. It all comes down to just the stress we put on our body and helping people realize just what it does to our nervous system. Basically, when our body is getting flooded with cortisol, which is our stress hormone, it has no energy, no ability to create other hormones that are needed in our body for us to function. And so our body, our brain is
00:06:47
Speaker
basically just saying, let's just survive. We just need to survive. And so we become extremely tired. We become anxious and irritable. Things like going walk outside seem really difficult because your body's like, that's going to take up energy, but we need that to survive. And so people who have experienced trauma, they're in this state of fight and flight and freeze constantly. And that does a lot to our health. After the break, Brenna will give us tips for healing the gut.
00:07:15
Speaker
She'll teach us a nervous system regulation exercise and tell us how prayer has changed for her since her mission. Stay tuned.
00:07:28
Speaker
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00:07:48
Speaker
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00:08:10
Speaker
How can we regulate our nervous system?
00:08:31
Speaker
a goal you have and so maybe spending less time on your phone and more time meditating or taking a bath or just taking that time to really rest and get good rest and then along with that we don't breathe properly so that's a big issue when we aren't breathing properly that also sends signals to our brain.
00:08:52
Speaker
that we are in danger. And so a lot of people breathe shallowly and through their chest when we need to be breathing slowly and through our stomach. And also taking longer exhales than inhales is what puts our body into that rest and digest instead of fight or flight.
00:09:10
Speaker
And then one more little tip that I love is to practice vagus nerve toning. For people who might not know, the vagus nerve, it goes through our whole body and has a lot of amazing functions. Helps with breathing and digestion and a lot of important things. And when we go through trauma, it becomes weakened. And so you can do things to strengthen it. And my favorite way to do that is called a vu breath. People might think it's weird, but basically you just make a
00:09:40
Speaker
with your mouth so it'll be even a O and just take a deep breath in and then and do that for one to three minutes. I do it in my car. I do it in the morning when I wake up and it is honestly it you can see a difference almost immediately when you're in a stressful situation. So those are just some tips that I have to kind of de-stress and
00:10:06
Speaker
get back into that rest and digest state. Activate the parasympathetic nervous system instead of the sympathetic. I like that. And I'm going to try the vu breaths for sure. What kinds of things other than nervous system regulation can we do to heal our gut?
00:10:25
Speaker
What a lot of people don't realize is stress, it doesn't always just come from outside influences like your job or a relationship. It comes from what we put into our body and onto our body as well. So when we eat food that maybe comes from a box or is deep fried in canola oil or something, those chemicals and those toxins that we ingest
00:10:51
Speaker
They get into our gut and our gut doesn't know how to digest those toxins and those chemicals and so it leads to things like leaky gut and then all of our food particles go back into our bloodstream and cause
00:11:08
Speaker
lots of other issues. So that's always my number one tip and it seems like it is kind of more expensive. That's always what people say. Well, that's expensive to make your own food or to buy organic. But when you think about it, if you just make food instead of going to eat out, it actually ends up saving you money. So that's one thing that I always suggest as well as making sure you're taking a good probiotic and just feeding your gut all the good stuff. I actually just have my kombucha right here.
00:11:38
Speaker
It's so good for you. And then, yeah, just eliminating as much stress as you can.
Mindset and Self-Care for Healing
00:11:44
Speaker
Sometimes we can get busy at work or school or with whatever we're doing. How can we tune into our bodies and make sure that we're taking care of ourselves?
00:11:55
Speaker
It's definitely something that I am still working on as well. I think that being aware is the first step. Just the fact that you understand, I didn't eat very well today. I'm not taking enough time for myself. I think there's a lot of women who just don't even realize that. They go to bed and they're like, oh, I don't need anything today. Then they're like, well, all right, maybe I'll lose a few pounds. That's just so unhealthy.
00:12:23
Speaker
Um, and so just being aware is the first step. I think the most important aspect of it all is to just have this compassion for yourself that is like all loving, like unconditional love for yourself, knowing that you're going through this process of
00:12:41
Speaker
retraining your brain, which is not an easy thing to do. You literally have to retrain your brain, fix all these habits. And so showing compassion for yourself, it looks like, you know, man, I didn't eat today. I understand that that is not good for myself, but I'm just going to do my best tomorrow and everything is going to be okay. Just having that love for yourself and knowing that over time, it's not going to happen.
00:13:10
Speaker
overnight it's something that will happen over time and as you build that awareness and as you build that compassion then You'll start to see those changes come about And like I said, it's very slow. I think that's the issue sometimes is we want things instantly That's just the world we live in right now. That's not how it's ever going to be and so I
00:13:32
Speaker
it's just a whole mindset ship along with that i would say that it kind of just starts in the morning this is what i found myself if i make time for myself in the morning to get in a state of peace you know do a little bit of meditating and.
00:13:49
Speaker
and planning ahead my day. So in the morning, I'm telling myself, this is what I'm going to do today. It's already in my brain. And as I go throughout the day, I'm more aware of the fact that I need to take breaks for myself and I need to make sure I'm eating. And then like I said, over time, it all just starts to add up. We need to still take that time to take care of ourselves
00:14:13
Speaker
to make sure we are being fed and we are taking a break. I think if I had had that mindset on my machine, it would have been a much different outcome. And I think that there's this shift
00:14:28
Speaker
in mindset that we need to have as women, I think we need to understand that if we don't put our own health first, then we can't help others because you're taught as a little girl, you know, you need to serve others. And that is such a good thing. Of course, we need to serve others. But how often are we taught? You need to serve yourself.
00:14:48
Speaker
You know, on the mission, which once again, the sentiment behind it is beautiful. We go on a mission to serve others, but we can't forget ourselves. That's not what should be happening. So you look at mind and body and spirit when you are working with clients and with yourself. How can you use prayer as a healing tool?
00:15:12
Speaker
Once I started praying instead to see why I was going through what I was going through and praying for patience and praying for understanding and love, that's when I started to see God healing me through prayer. It wasn't that things suddenly got easier, it was that I was understanding more and I was growing closer to him and that's what he wanted me to do.
00:15:40
Speaker
I think when it comes to using prayer to heal, it's important to understand the why behind the prayer. God's not always going to take away the pain, but He's always going to walk you through it. And also, another way to use prayer for healing is to ask others to pray for you and to pray with you, just knowing that there are people praying for you. Like my grandma, she always tells me that she's praying for me. And every time I'm like, your prayers are the best.
00:16:09
Speaker
And so just having that knowledge that someone is praying for you, it helps a lot. It gives you a lot of feeling of love and keeps you going. One last question. What do you want women to know to stay healthy and to be healthy?
00:16:25
Speaker
I want them to know that there's hope. I think that a lot of times you feel your worst when you feel like you're alone and you feel like there's no hope left. I have definitely had experiences where I didn't know how I could go on. I was so anxious.
00:16:45
Speaker
I would have anxiety attacks. I would feel like I was never going to get out of this. The only thing sometimes that kept me going was knowing that there had been other people who had been in worse conditions than me and they got through it.
00:17:03
Speaker
and also knowing that Christ made it possible for us to get through everything and that He, even if no one else understood, He did. And so,
Health Coaching and Faith
00:17:12
Speaker
what I want to say to women when it comes to healing is to know that it will be okay.
00:17:18
Speaker
that you are not alone and that there is a recipe, there is a roadmap to recovery. Brenna Hart specializes in health coaching returning sister missionaries. So if you or someone you know is struggling and in that position, reach out to her for her remote health coaching services. I've linked to her Instagram and coaching program in the show notes. Faith and spirituality can be an important tool for healing when we've been through trauma.
00:17:48
Speaker
Taking care of ourselves and listening to our bodies and minds are key to wellness and health. But if someone is taking over your life, creating chaos, and hurting you emotionally, spiritually, or financially, you might need a life detox.
00:18:15
Speaker
The Life Detox is produced by me, Stephanie Greenwood, and brought to you by Bubble and Be Organic. The views and opinions expressed are the speakers' own and do not necessarily represent those of myself or my company. Material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and is not medical advice. Being a guest on this show does not imply endorsement of Greenplay LLC or any of its projects. Stay well, friends.
00:18:49
Speaker
Next time on The Life Detox. I'm speaking with neuroendocrinology researcher Alexander Kaufman about polycystic ovarian syndrome. We'll take a deep dive into the brain science behind this disorder. I hope you'll join us.