Karyn Shanks MD

By writing every day, you create a safe sanctuary you can count on as you welcome all your thoughts and feelings, giving them space and a voice. Through this process you’ll forge a deep bond of trust with yourself, helping you thrive through life’s challenges as more your whole, true, authentic self. In this way, your daily writing practice becomes a boundary to protect who you authentically are.

Love,
Karyn

-Awareness

Creating strong personal-energetic boundaries is one of the hardest things we learn to do. But they’re essential to everything we need to do to heal.

Love,
Karyn

Love,
Karyn

What did you notice? Was it a piece of cake? Familiar? Awkward? Real?

My point in having you take just a few fully conscious breaths is to show you how presence is not rocket-science. We’re not after mountain tops or grandiosity here. Presence does not have to be torture. And there are literally no rules other than you must show up for it. Since it may be new for you, it will take practice to get comfortable with it. With repeated practice our brains create new neural connections to support the practice. Practice creates neuroplastic mind grooves that let self-awareness become a piece of cake.

Love,
Karyn

Learning to become present in our bodies, in our minds, in our feelings, in our energy, in our souls, in our present-moment fully embodied experience is the most important tool in our tool kit for change, growth, and healing.

How do we do it?

Hint: not rocket-science! Just do what you do but more deeply. Slow down just a bit. Breathe more deeply. Pay attention to all the sensations, feelings, and shifts in energy.

Love,
Karyn

Beautiful morning for a move!

Rising to the top of Maslow’s evolved pyramid, one can continue to reach a deeper level of wisdom, transcending oneself to help create safety and connection for others, including the collective human population (all-is-one consciousness). Self-transcendence is expressed by actively considering the needs of others and caring for family-community-culture-planet in ways that serve their needs beyond oneself.

I would take Maslow’s theory further by submitting that recipients of transcendent love rise in safety. And so, rise more robustly through the developmental trajectory of needs as depicted in Maslow’s model. The transcendence of one raises the safety of another. The safety of another expands their potential, deepening their lived experience and wisdom as humans.

Which is to say what we all surely know by now. Love is safety. Love creates a circle of safety. Love elevates everyone.

Love,
Karyn

Love,
Karyn

No bad parts. All genius. All of it. Every iteration of each one of us.

Love,
Karyn

Richard Schwartz, PhD, founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS), describes us as having “no bad parts.” All the parts of us that show up do so because they helped us survive and thrive. Even the parts that make us uncomfortable. Even the parts we’re not proud of. Even the parts that hurt others. They were all necessary. All to be revered.

Love,
Karyn

My boys!

All my love,
Karyn

There’s an upside to this confusion. We can scrutinize our perspectives, the stories we tell about our feelings. We can question them and learn from them. We can identify what we need. And we can practice embodied present moment awareness to reconnect to what we feel. In this way, our perspectives become portals too.

Love,
Karyn

While our perspectives about our feelings may be close approximations to our truth, the ones that don’t align with us and our truth keep us suffering and stuck.

Love,
Karyn

Can’t wait to explore these with you in my upcoming book, Unbroken: Reclaim Your Wholeness.

Love,
Karyn

Roadblocks to healing every time. If you’d like to scrutinize your own obstacles to healing, ask: what’s the story I’m telling here?

Love,
Karyn

Food we can control. Good food leads to safety. Safety leads to resilience.

Love,
Karyn

Our walk today.

A nutritionally safe diet is often referred to as an “anti-inflammatory diet,” an “elimination diet,” or an “autoimmune protocol (AIP) diet.”

In my practice, we call it “GRIN,” Gut-Immune Restoration Intensive Nutrition food plan. You can find the details on my website.

Love,
Karyn

Include dark green leafy varieties, the brassica family (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussel’s sprouts, watercress), alliums (onions, shallots, garlic), dark berries, and a variety of herbs and spices daily.

Most plants are easier to digest and more nutritionally bioavailable when lightly cooked (steamed, sautéed, roasted).

Love,
Karyn

Technological sophistication is not the same as growth.

Growth in medicine would mean catching up to who we are and what we need. It would mean responding to our complexity and need for solutions that address our problems way up stream. To help us shift from the deepest roots of our pain and suffering. Not just temporarily fixing our symptoms. Not sending us away without being seen, heard, or known.

Been there. Doesn’t work.

Love,
Karyn

Or do you bypass rest? Skimp on sleep? Nap only when you’re crisis-level exhausted? Do you make room for pauses or play scheduled into your busy life of chores, work, duty, and checklists?

Recovery step # 1: Be real with yourself about your relationship to rest.

Full disclosure: I’m a work in progress.

You?

Love,
Karyn

Awesome place to be on a hot summer day.

My prairie.

Then, commit to a daily practice of shifting, of paying attention. Use the presence practices we just learned, embodied self-awareness with compassion and curiosity and agency, and your core strengthening practices.

Love,
Karyn