Before we begin, a quick note. The conversation that you're about to hear is for general wellness and educational purpose only. It's not medical advice and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified healthcare professional. The views and approaches shared by our guests are their own. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your nutrition, fasting practices, supplements, or any health routines. Especially if you have an existing medical condition or are taking medication. Take what's useful, leave what's not, and take care of yourself. With that, folks, welcome back to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. I'm your host Cyan, as some of you would know, and today we are going somewhere that most wellness conversations get past into the everyday foundation that uh quietly hold up uh our expectations about mental and emotional lives. My guest today is Dr. Henry Ailey, known to many as Dr. H. He's the founder of the Energetic Health Institute, the author of multiple books on holistic health and a teacher who has spent over 20 years training people in holistic nutrition, fasting, and natural recovery practices. So today I invite you all to join me on this journey where we would be talking about uh what uh the territory of burnout and chronic stress uh looks like and how you can rebuild from this. So, Dr. H, it's a real privilege to have you here. And I think this is a very, very important topic. So let's dig right in.

Amen. And it's a privilege as well for me to be here. Thank you so much, family.

Thanks, Any. Likewise. So before we get into the heart of this conversation, I want to start with your story because I think two decades uh inside any field is a long, long time indeed, and that just shows the dedication uh of an individual towards it. So um I think I would say that before any of the protocols or frameworks, uh take me back, take us back. Like what pulled you into this work in the first place? And what was the moment when you know that this wasn't going to be a career, but really a calling from um whatever uh we call it the uh higher energy, the divine power, whatever that is.

Right. Well, um God, I have to I have to think back a little bit right now. It's been a minute. Um, but uh you know what I just fell in love. You know what it you know what it is, and this is what I I look for in in students is just there's something about it that you just can't get enough of. Um, I remember sitting at uh Manny's bakery in on La Brea in Los Angeles, and it'd be a Friday night, a Saturday night. And here I am with my netter's atlas of human anatomy and my physiology books and whatever else I'm reading, you know, with a highlighter and taking notes. And it was just so fascinating, saying, to look underneath the skin and see what was going on. And I think for me, I started out as an engineer uh and as a computer programmer, right? So, you know, you want to understand why things work, why things work. And the answers that we would get often when I was very young didn't satisfy me, like when we would go to a hospital, for instance. There were a number of occasions where I was carried into a hospital by my father and uh told by the people that I was going to die. You should just take him home. He's going to die. I remember listening to those conversations, and that didn't make sense. You know, when we get into engineering, it's you know, you understand that the body is a bunch of systems, and systems, when they have the right things that they need, they work beautifully well. And this is what's so phenomenal about our bodies is that we're they're designed, yes, by higher source, higher energy God, our creator, whatever name you want to refer to this beautiful, loving experience as. Um, but that they're designed to heal themselves. And so what it comes down to is the environment. We've had this argument, this absurd argument, going on for, you know, quite a long time. Germs or terrain. And it's like, well, you don't have to pick one or the other. A germ is only going to promote itself in a terrain that promotes the germ. So if you're eating a lot of sugar, for example, the easiest thing, you're gonna feed the germs, and they're going to be opportunistic and they're gonna produce disease, they're gonna produce endotoxin, mycotoxin, all these things, and it's gonna pollute the environment. And now the environment is not sustainable for a person to be able to heal themselves, let alone promote the system uh functioning and how we're we're designed to be. So it was a lot of curiosity, saying, and uh, and then as luck would have it, um, my mother was diagnosed with uh cancer um many, many years ago. And uh I got to watch the um, and I I I use this term a lot, and I would encourage your audience to look it up and everything. I have a book coming out on this group of people, um, and I've traced back their history about 2,500 years to the uh plague of Athens in 500 BC, but they go by the name of the cult of Asclepius. And everywhere you see a stick with a single snake going up it, that is the symbol for the cult of Asclepius. And so I got to see the cult of Asclepius again firsthand, this time with my mother. And I got to see them um cutting pieces of her away and burning her and and sadly and poisoning her. And I felt, and I still feel this way. We we there are better ways. There are better ways when people are in need. There are better ways to work with the divine design of the body, there are better ways to encourage a healthy cellular terrain environment. There are better ways than cutting, burning, and poisoning to create health. And I've proven that. I've worked with plenty of people who've recovered from very serious diseases, all the way up to cancer, by just saying, let's look at the environment, let's get the environment right, and then let's trust that the body knows what it needs to do. And sadly, that wasn't what happened for my mother, but it was a great lesson. And one of her final lessons to me was really beautiful. And she said this saying to me before she passed. She said, help them. And I didn't know fully what that meant when she said it so long ago, but I know what it she meant today. She was, I I know, time traveling. She was going in between death and and life and seeing the future, and she was seeing that we had problems that we were going to have to solve. And these problems are gonna require us understanding not only how the body is divinely designed, but all of the things that we have that we can use for it and work in harmony with how the body is designed so that the body can do what it is designed to do, and that is heal itself. And so that's what I spend my life doing now is studying how to be better at that, how to be a better teacher of it. And right now, as we speak, I broke my foot on Friday last week. It's very painful, right? But I'm using everything I teach my students on how to heal it, and it's only been six days. I'm already walking on the foot. You know, it there are things that we can do when we don't believe what we've been misled to believe in many cases, and that's where I come in.

Well, that's uh pretty diverse uh background that you come from, Dr. Henry. Uh, I would say, because I think, yeah, the problem-solving uh uh mindset is still there with you. That uh is a show for that you were uh an engineer once. And uh, you know, I I I really um I could relate to what you said, right? I mean, uh definitely that reframes something important. But um I think coming back to today's um topic, uh, which is on uh more realistic living, uh, I would say there's there has been a misconception um sitting right at the heart of many people um about how they understand burnout. So the idea that it's a mental or emotional issue and that the solution is more boundaries or better mindset, maybe a vacation, whatever you name it. Um but you have watched thousands of people walk through this and your perspective comes from a deeper place. So I want to ask you like, what's the misconception about burnout that costs people the most and what's actually happening in the body that the conversation almost misses?

It's a fascinating topic, and it's a and it's a great topic. We we first need to figure out is the person burnt out because they're doing too much of what they love doing, or are they burnt out because they are not pursuing their purpose? And I think this is ungood though. Well, the too much of anything is not a good thing. So it, you know, we have to trust the way we feel. And I think what you bring to the table here is this really honest conversation about I feel this way. And is that okay to feel that way? And the first thing we get into is this understanding of I I must trust that I feel a way that I do for a reason, that there must be truth in it, you know. So let's take me for example. I love what I do. Too much so sometimes, too, where I work 60 hour weeks easily, right? Too much of a good thing isn't a good thing, right? And I'll have moments where, oh, I don't feel like doing this. Oh, but you should do this because you love doing it. Well, as soon as you find yourself saying the word should, you have now put an obligation, a judgment on yourself. And so it becomes very important to listen to the language that we use when we talk to ourselves. Because when you're excited to do something and you're filled with energy, there is no I should do this. You just go and do it. But if you have to talk yourself into doing something, it's important to assess, well, why am I talking myself into this? For me, it's usually I've overdone it too much. And now it's time for me to step back. And it's time for me to look at my meditative practice and say, oh, I've been taking away from my meditative practice so I could put more time into work. Am I nourishing myself here? Am I taking myself away from my work so that I miss my work? Absence, you need, it's going to make the heart grow fonder. We need to miss the things that we love. But the flip side of that saying is, and I find this to be true for most people, is that somewhere along the line, they accepted someone else's idea of life. They accepted somebody else's idea of life and put what they wanted to do, what their heart was telling them that they wanted to do to the side and started pursuing someone else's idea of their own life. And when we do that, when we start to live our life for other people, we are going to get exhausted because our heart is telling us this is not why you were born, this is not why you are here. Deep down, we know that this is not our purpose, but we fake it. And especially it becomes very complex when the money comes in. It becomes very complex when your lifestyle is dependent upon a certain amount of money being made. And this job that you have that you don't really love is at least paying that much money in. And now choices have to be made. Do I want to keep doing this thing I don't love and I don't feel I'm here for? Or do I want to take that wonderful risk and explore this thing that my heart just can't get enough of? My encouragement saying to people is always the same: trust yourself. Listen to your heart's first thought and go with it. The money will come. What you need will be there on your journey. But the first step of the journey needs your courage to take that first step and to trust that there's something greater going on that we're all a part of. And this thing that's greater is principled upon, is founded upon love. And that if we can just simply tell our minds to quiet down for a second so we can get into the heart energy and trust this process. What starts happening is what this guy over my shoulder would say. One door might close, but many more start to open. And the doors that open are the doors that bring you to the people that were going to create happiness in your life. The doors that open are the doors that are going to make you feel fulfilled in what you're doing in your life. A life of purpose is a life of health because when you have purpose, something happens within each and every cell of your body. In each and every cell of your body, you have these wonderful little powerhouses called mitochondria. We all talk about them. You take a biology class, you go, oh, these things are fantastic. They are. They're actually the key to health or disease. Because a mitochondria that has a purpose, an electrical current going through the body that says, I am doing exactly what I am here to do, is a mitochondria that will continually produce energy. Sam, go ahead and blink your eye. I love this little thing I do with folks. Blink your eyes real quick.

Okay.

All right. Now, guess how many things went right in your body for you to even blink your eye? Guess how many things went right? Take a wild guess, an outlandish guess.

Must have been millions, I guess.

Right. That's outlandish. Millions of things went right. Can I tell you this is a low estimate? This is a low estimate. Over 900,000 trillion things went right in your body in the time that it took you to blink your eye. 900,000 trillion things went right.

I can't wrap my head around that big of a number, right?

Right. All the more, if that many things can go right in a blink of an eye, a snap of a finger. In my opinion, it's logical then to trust what created that system. That it had it knows things far beyond anything that I could know. And that if I trust, the right door is going to open for me. But that trust comes somewhere, and this is why it's so important for us to meditate every day. That trust comes from listening inside of us. We know right from wrong. We know what's right for us and what's not right for us. The question becomes for many people do we have the courage to act upon what we know? Because when we have the courage to act upon what we know, something magical takes place in our life and our electricity in our body begins to perform differently. And wherever there's electricity, there's going to be a magnetic field, what people call an auric field. But it's a magnetic field. And wherever that magnetic field, whatever that magnetic field is pulsing out for you, it's interacting with this invisible thing that we call the universe. It's interacting with it. And now this is how the universe knows what to bring you. Because the universe is here wanting to serve you because it wants you to have the highest experience of yourself at all times. Well, how can you have the highest experience of yourself if you're not willing to have the courage to trust your heart's first thought? That's my question to your audience today.

Wow. Oh wow. That's that's a lot of stuff uh really to unpack here. And I really love how we tied it back to the universe, uh perhaps, uh, how I see consciousness itself. And I think it ties back to uh, you know, a little bit of about how I see consciousness as that. It's just universe trying to understand its own nature, right? And and so, and so it's kind of weird, like when you try to think about what you're thinking, uh, right. So if I tell someone, okay, what let's try to think about what you're thinking, they suddenly go blank. So uh I mean there there's this interesting um, I would say, ideas or analogies to it, but I think the way that you described it, right, is that uh the the way that the field, the field, because that's again uh you could uh you know take it from uh the current, the state of current that's flowing around your body. And uh I mean I really really found that very scientific, and I think it really uh explains why uh the universe treats you well when you have or when you are in that flow state, because uh I think indeed the universe wants to treat you well, number one. So it just I think it just reacts to what is your body uh trying to uh radiate out of it. So I think that that's really uh wonderful, wonderful explanation and something that I have not heard before this uh conversation, Dr. Henry. So I I love it. So I just want to ask you uh one last question for uh the audience today, and uh and I'm gonna take it uh to the other side of the coin, uh, which is on fasting, because I I think I have heard um a lot of um there's there's uh lately a lot of information about fasting, and uh in some culture, even like in Islam, uh fasting is a real thing, and and so uh I have read uh these researches uh and including uh so one of my uh colleagues actually has done fasting for 18 days, Dr. Henry. 18 days without anything, right? And and it's just he just took in water and that's it. And and you know, not not only did he not lose significant weight, but he was way more healthier and energetic and was hit his gym at the same energy. Now that's that's something insane, and I called him insane, and people around him called him insane and and didn't know that he was at a fast for 18 days. But I'm curious to know. So indeed, fasting has its own um, I would say, pros. Like it it does help clean your body from the inside. But I'm curious to know, are there any cons? Or I mean, because there's a lot of information in this digital age, and uh there are a lot of uh contradiction and uh you know uh information that overlaps with one other one another. So I think you would be the best person to really uh uh explain and perhaps uh dive deeper into those myths.

Well, I'm gonna tell you if I had but one natural therapy to choose, I would always choose fasting. Why? Because fasting does something that no other natural therapeutic can do except for what we know about cannabis, but even cannabis doesn't do it anywhere near that fasting does. When we fast, uh we get very hungry, and hunger is a sign that you're engaging something called autophagocytosis, means that your body starts eating. But this is where you get into the brilliance of the body's design. The body will start eating that which should not be there. So that means that the body knows what should be there and what should not, and it knows how to discriminate between what should be eaten and what should be left alone. And so when you get into a fasting state, especially when you get into ketosis, usually by about the 48-hour mark for most people, and that's usually the hump that people got to get over. But once you get into that 48-hour mark and you get past it, you start producing ketone bodies, you can get a ketone strip, check your urine, you can get a ketone breath meter and check and see where you're at. Okay. What your body starts doing is your body starts going into an advanced state of healing, and it does this for about three days. At the end of those three days, so by about day five, what's happening is now the immune system is turning over, meaning the immune system is resetting itself. And it's resetting itself at a very point, uh important point in time, because at that point, what happens is now cells, your stem cells start to grow. So your body, by about day five, day seven, somewhere in that range, starts to produce a lot of stem cells, starts to regenerate itself. And then when you get into about day nine and beyond, now you start to get into what some of the great teachers, the great master teachers throughout our history have taught us. You start to get into a spiritual understanding. Understanding of yourself. And like you were talking about the consciousness of the universe seeking to understand itself, you get to have this these moments in time where you can understand yourself and hear clearly voices. You can see things a little bit differently. Your dreams take on an added dimension of information and clarity coming into you. The noise is gone. That's what food does for us. It fuels us, but it also creates a lot of noise, a lot of waste that has to be cleared. And that creates a lot of noise in the body. The longest I've ever fasted, Zan, is 37 days. And it was it was a phenomenal experience. And I just finished uh a nine-day fast in January or February or something like that. I like to fast every month if I can. My work doesn't allow me to do that. But I like to do it because we live in an age where we're being sprayed with Kimtros. We live in an age where we have so much pollution we come in contact with. It makes sense to give the body just a few days at a time to say, hey, clean up whatever you didn't get a chance to get to. And what you find is that you're capable of far more than anyone thought possible. It doesn't make sense that a person can go fasting for 18 days, not eat, and go to the gym and be an insane man. But he was able to do it. And so I think the thing we learn about ourselves saying through fasting that I love so much is that we are capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for. And that's one of the great lessons that we can learn in our lifetime, this lifetime.

Yeah. So one last question, Dr. Henry. I mean, um, so I think uh I I was uh surprised when you said 37 days. And uh from my understanding or whatever has been you know put onto textbook, uh, I think the human body can go without 30 days. So I'm going to ask you one last question because we are near the minute marquee. How long of a fast is bad for you, or is there even a limit?

I would say it to this. They asked, I'll answer it with Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington has a great quote, famous musician, jazz musician from the from the 1900s. Uh writer asked him, How long is a good song? And Duke Ellington responded, I don't know. How long is a song good? It's the same with fasting. There's a music, there's a harmony to it. And you will know when it's time to break the fast. You will know. If you set in your mind, I'm going to do 40 days, like the 37 day, I was like, I'm going to do 40 days. I wanted to do 40 days, right? On day 37, my body said, You are going to eat right now, or you're going to die. And the feeling was so obvious that I had to go and eat. And I'm so glad that I did. I listened to my body. What's going to happen for everyone is the more you fast, just like the more you meditate, the more you can hear what's going on within you and outside of you. And all you have to do is follow those instructions to have the best life that you could possibly have. It's very simple.

Wow, I had never heard that one before. And I think that's something that uh really speaks to me, really. I mean, the body in itself is such uh a complex uh mechanism, and uh it really has these feedback mechanisms, right? That that will tell you uh what you need to eat, when do you need to eat, and you know, if you're sick, uh what is that that you shouldn't eat? You will get these signs perhaps. Uh it's wonderful. And and even though we uh hit uh the midmark today, Dr. Hendy, I really I think enjoyed this uh very insightful and practical conversation. And I'm sure so many of listeners uh uh were perhaps amused uh by these uh statements as well. So I am going to ask you one more question before we wrap this off. People who actually resonated with this conversation and would love to connect with you because uh I believe there's there's so much of knowledge that uh uh we can again from your work and your books. So, where's the best place for them to find you and uh learn about your work?

Well, say, and thank you so much for having me. I've done a lot of interviews, I've done over a thousand interviews in the last couple of years. This has been one of my favorites as well. Thank you for not talking about politics. This is great. Well, so I would say if people are resonating with this and they have a uh curiosity, that thirst and want to know more, uh, I would love to share everything that I have learned and am learning. Uh, just come to energetic health institute.org. That's energetichealthinstitute.org. You'll be able to find out which student you are, which we have four types of students that we cater to. You'll be able to find out which type of student you are and which of our educational experiences are perfect for you. But I can promise you we have at least one that's perfect for you.

Brilliant. So I'll put all of that in the episode notes or easy to find uh for anyone who really needs it. And uh, folks, with that, we hit today's minute mark, unfortunately. So I just want to say this out loud that if something in this conversation did give you a new way of looking at your own uh representation levels or perhaps uh um that consciousness that we talked about. Uh I would really ask you to do one thing before you move on. Uh, don't really make uh I mean start immediately with a new plan. Uh right, just just notice what your body is really trying to tell you, or how tired even if it's actually is uh after the work or after uh you know your plans or uh I mean whatever it is that you you do for a living and wherever you are sitting right now, because I think that single act of listening is where every honest recovery begins. So, with that, folks, this has been Scion on the Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. And uh Dr. H, I want to thank you for this kind of immense uh deep wisdom and the depth of your work has truly touched me. And I'm I'm sure the listeners have enjoyed it as well. So, folks, with that to you, uh listening, take care of yourself and uh please be gentle with uh the body because it is the one that has been carrying so much from day zero. So, with that, folks, take care and I'll see you in the next one.