Ep. 148: Love is Medicine! A Chat with Razi Berry

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robyn: Hey everyone, it’s Robyn Openshaw and welcome back to Vibe.

Since you last heard from me, I’ve just moved again. I moved across town, just across the same freeway exit here in Park City, Utah.

I am absolutely loving my new house because my office is on the main floor, and I have beautiful views everywhere. It’s way up, about a hundred yards above a golf course (hopefully when they spray garbage on it, I don’t breathe it); I’m about a hundred yards away from it and a hundred yards up and I’m just loving the new space. I did not love my basement office in the four bedroom condo that I bought a year ago and have lived in the last year.

Big life transition once again. There’s always life transitions, right? And when we can learn to find the joy in it and just lean into it and not always be thinking, “I’ll be happy later. I’ll be happy later when I move.” I was very careful to not do that when it started; I started to be aware that living in a very cold ski town where I have to go downstairs and work full time in a basement office, I started to realize I really didn’t like it.

I decided, “I’m going to still be happy, even though this bothers me.” And of course, I’m also really aware of how first-world that problem is.

Speaking of finding the joy in whatever stage of life you’re in, and even in a flawed, imperfect world, our podcast producer, Sue, has launched her own podcast. If you want to check it out, it’s on iTunes and other places where you can find podcasts and it’s called “A Cup of Joy.” So make sure and support her over there; it’s great higher level thinking and thinking in terms of the world around us and our connection to it.

Which is a great bridge to who I am interviewing today, a friend of mine named Razi Berry.

That’s her real name. It’s R-A-Z-I. She did not make that up. It’s a pretty cute name; it’s what her mother actually named her.

She is a long-time journal editor and founder of NaturalPath. She really brings the naturopathic physicians together. She’s run some really cool summits on natural cancer prevention, the heart revolution; heal, empower, and follow your heart.

Right now, she’s working on a docu-series she’s launching called “Love Is Medicine.” How interesting is that? That makes you want to jump into it, doesn’t it?

She was, as a very young child, very, very ill. She had terrible infertility problems later, she had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and it was when she opted out of the drugs and surgery methods and started looking at naturopathic medicine that she started to get well.

According to all of her risks early in life, she shouldn’t have lived this long.

She has really learned and lived the mind-body healing paradigm, and she’s a huge fan of naturopathy and bringing it to others and protecting and preserving the vital life force in all living things. She’s a gentle, sweet soul. She’s physically beautiful. She’s really an inspiration because she’s overcome a lot of disease and a lot of challenges in her life.

I’m really excited to introduce you to my friend Razi Berry. So welcome to the Vibe show Razi Berry.

Razi Berry: Hi Robyn. It’s great to be here. Thank you so much.

Robyn: Oh, I’m so pleased to have you. I know you have something very cool coming up that I want to talk about. But let’s start with your background, running a journal of naturopathic medicine. Tell us why you got into that field and why you love it. Give us some background.

Razi Berry: Well, it starts when I was a teenager; I was in the hospital dying of heart failure. To make a long story short, I had a transformational experience.

I was dying of heart failure because I had an eating disorder. The priest had come in and did last rights; Father McGuire, who is our family priest, came into Phoenix Children’s hospital and did my last rights. Which, in the Catholic tradition I was raised in, is basically a sacrament for the dying.

And I had a spontaneous healing.

My heart, which was failing me at age 14, had a spontaneous healing that some people call a near-death experience. Some people don’t. We do know in the research that spontaneous healing does happen, cancer, all kinds of illnesses. But what that did was, it planted this question in my mind: “Where does healing come from?”

It planted that question because I was raised in a very conventionally-leaning medicine family. Whenever we were sick we would go to the doctor and get a shot or get a prescription. Our fevers were always suppressed. My mom just didn’t know any different. So I, and my whole family, were like, “Wow.”

Usually it’s the doctor that heals you; this time the doctors couldn’t do anything and yet I healed. That planted this early seed throughout my life.

Later on, when I was in my mid-twenties and became very chronically ill — which was later diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia — I was still kind of in the conventional medicine world and I was going from doctor to doctor to doctor to try to get help. Meantime, my pain was so bad that I would have to crawl across the floor of my apartment to get to the bathroom from my bed, and back.

I’d had a really great career in real estate, and I had to quit my job. The medicines the doctors were putting me on were very strong. It made my hair fall out. There were steroids and pain pills and antidepressants and things to help me go to sleep at night and things to wake me up in the morning. And I just didn’t want to do that anymore.

I went to my doctors — at the Mayo Clinic, actually — and said, “This is not working for me. I don’t want to cover up the symptoms. I want to get better.” And that’s when she said, “If you don’t want to take these medicines, then you need to see our psychiatrist.”

The psychiatrist said, “You know, mentally you’re fine,” but the other doctors were like, “This is all in your head.”

So I fired them, Robyn. I said (I had tears streaming through all of this) I said, “You’re fired.”

Similar to your story with saving your son when he was very young from failure to thrive, I was ready to take my health into my own hands. That’s when I eventually discovered naturopathic medicine. And then I ended up marrying a student, a naturopathic medical student, and realized that there wasn’t really a journal, that the profession was so young and so emerging that there wasn’t one.

I just felt evangelical about wanting people to understand — just like when you went on your 450 city tour teaching people about how they can heal through food, and now fasting — I just wanted people to understand that there is hope, and your body can heal. And that’s why I started Naturopathic Doctor News & Review. And now we’re in our 15th year of publication.

 

Love Is Medicine: Reconnect to Sources of Love

Robyn: I know that you’ve published over 2000 case studies. I think you dive into a specific case study about one, a healing case. What have you learned? If you step back up to the 35,000-foot view, what have you learned reviewing 2000 cases over the last almost 15 years?

Razi Berry: What I’m about to say is not going to sound like rocket science, but I think it’s a really simple but powerful shift that patients and clinicians need to take.

What I found is that there is always a place of disconnection that leads to disease. I look back on my heart failure and the eating disorder; you can’t starve yourself and ignore your body’s cues and not nourish yourself if you’re connected to yourself. You can’t eat your way into diabetes, or heart disease, if you’re really connected to yourself. You can’t. We can’t have people that abuse and traumatize children into a future autoimmune disease if we’re connected to each other, and we can’t poison our world into hormonal and endocrine disruption if we’re actually connected to the earth.

It’s simple but powerful work. We’re disconnected from each other. We’re disconnected from the world around us and nature, and we’re disconnected from ourselves. It’s just a simple switch to reconnect to those sources of love.

You talk a lot about vibration, you wrote a book about vibration. What it comes down to is that healing capacity that we have, that nature has, that we can experience between people in a relationship. Yes, it’s a vibration, it’s a force.

When we choose love, the way we eat, the way we move, the way we relate, the way we talk, the way we move through our day and the daily decisions we make, that’s where I’ve seen — in all of these cases — when healing takes place and when it doesn’t.

 

The Science of Intuition

Robyn: Interesting.

I know that in the past year or so, you’ve really been studying what you call “the science of intuition.” And I am super excited to hear what you have to say about it because I could not have been more disconnected from my intuition in my twenties, and even my thirties. And one of the great discoveries in my forties and now into my fifties is to listen to my intuition because it’s usually right. It may not send me two sentences of information. It just sends me very important information that I need to usually sit with for a while before I understand it.

But it has made me a better mother. It’s made me a better lover. It’s made me a better citizen of the earth, a better colleague. And so I’m excited to hear what the science of intuition is because I know that you talk about how it helps you make the right decisions in all those areas. Business, love, life.

Razi Berry: Yes. Yes. So what a lot of people think intuition is — I think it’s really misleading it — it’s often thought to be this psychic phenomenon. And I’m not saying that psychic phenomenon doesn’t exist. I think it does. I wouldn’t call myself a psychic and I think some people perhaps are, but when intuition is, it’s a full body physiological experience that we all have, no matter whether you think you have it or not.

I’m studying it, I’m writing about it, but it doesn’t mean I have something that somebody listening doesn’t have. It’s an innate part of our physiology. It’s rooted in these (kind of hidden from us or not really talked about) senses of perception that we have that we don’t really pay attention to. But there’s a growing body of evidence around that.

That is mediated by what I call our three hearts.

Like the stomach is called the second brain, where our three hearts are, are our three nervous systems. One is in your head and your central nervous system. One is in your center of your body, your chest or intracardiac nervous system. And another is, yes, your enteric nervous system in your gut.

They all speak to each other through, yes, the vegus nerve, but also through lymphatic flow, through the entire connectome. It’s what I call physioconsciousness.

I know you’re familiar with the late Candace Pert, who was an amazing pharmacologists and cell biologist who discovered the opiate receptor. She said, “These receptors that were once thought to be just in your brain — like an opiate receptor — now we’re learning about endocannabinoid receptors. Cannabinoid receptors are in every part of your body — our sex organs, in our vascular system — just everywhere.”

Whenever something responds to its environment, that’s a form of cognition. So it also takes in the field of embodied cognition where we learned that we think and remember with every cell in our body. That’s how the vaccinations are supposed to work, right? Supposedly you introduced something and your body remembers it. Our immune system has a memory.

Well, Candace Pert called all of these molecules of emotion basically chemical substances, that the body produces that helps you connect to your greater non-local consciousness. And you, as an author of many books, including one called Vibe that speaks about this vibration, we know that quantum mechanics and quantum physics can really appreciate and measure this.

The science of intuition takes into context the fact that we have data coming in and surrounding us at all times. You’re not just being, smelling, tasting, hearing and touching, but also [sensing] through these really amazing things we’re discovering.

Like for instance, you have olfactory receptors which are part of the sense of smell, right? You don’t have them just in your nose. We have them in our arteries. It’s been discovered in the last six years that our kidneys have olfactory receptors that helps sniff out what is in your blood so your body can make constant adjustments.

We have an ability called chemosensing where we take in information from everywhere — food, the atmosphere, sunlight, each other — any subtle chemical messengers that come through, like body odor, vibration; your body takes in a lot of data and we are taught to not dress these messages.

We also have this sense called magnetoreception, where it used to be thought that only animals had magnetic sense and that’s how they would migrate. That’s how a group of elephants in a drought could go find water far away. It’s because they have this ability, it’s in their eyes; a cryptochrome that can sense these magnetic fields. It’s been very well studied in animals and fruit flies.

It’s also been found that humans also have this. Love at first sight, or when you’re in the right place at the right time, or the sense of being stared at, like you feel somebody’s watching you. All of these things that are usually attributed to psychic phenomenon is actually a physiological symphony that’s happening in your body.

We are taught at the beginning of our lives, Robyn, not listen to that. The minute you give birth — the doctor takes the baby, does some blood work, cleans off the vernix — you are treated as a medical case. Then every month of the child’s life they’re supposed to be measured and looked at by a doctor. That’s just one example of how we’re taught to not really pay attention, or listen within.

What I’m hoping to do is share some of this research I’ve been doing and inspire people to understand the amazing capacity of their body to understand and gain access. That is what intuition is.

I know that was a long-winded answer, but that is the truth about our intuition.

Robyn: I’m fascinated by about 16 different things you said there, especially how you said that Candace Pert describes molecules of emotion because that puts Newtonian principles into play for why it is that we [feel].

Love Is Medicine: Our Emotions Heal

For instance, we’ve detoxed 13,000 people now in our 26-day detox program, and I have this video where I talk about how I became so committed to doing periodic detox. When old proteins dislodged from my body, I was sobbing, and I felt this rush of memory of a person who had abused me extensively the first 18 years of my life.

And it all left me. It came up and it flowed through me as a bunch of garbage, a physical garbage left my body. My explanation for it, my understanding, was it was old proteins leaving my body.

We’re the carriers of emotion. And when I went through this physical detox, I let go of some tremendous resentful, even angry energy that was holding me back, that really wasn’t serving me anymore. I’d outgrown it, didn’t need to be there. It was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.

When people see my video masterclass about the detox, when they get to that last video (I don’t want them to see at first because it’s heavy duty stuff) it’s like okay, now that you understand the physical process of detoxing, let’s talk about what happens for you on a more metaphysical level, but they’re really interconnected.

I’m fascinated by this idea that there are molecules of emotion because the idea of a molecule itself, we’re supposed to transcend that to go into Einsteinian type of quantum thinking. I’m fascinated by what you’re doing and how it brings it all together.

I’d love it if you’d just break down intuition a little bit more. Talk about what it is to you. I know that you say that it’s clear that we can improve our intuition, so just talk more about any and all of that.

Razi Berry: Yes.

I first wanted to say something about what you just said, that kind of release that you felt in your body.

We even know that crying and tears, like emotional crying, has been studied a lot — and it’s still quite a mystery — but in emotional tears, which are also sometimes called psychic tears, there are traces of prolactin, which is a bonding hormone. There are traces of Serotonin, there is leucine enkephalin, which are natural pain killers. We know that it kind of feels good sometimes to have a good cry.

I think that’s kind of a neat example of molecules of emotion because we often also are taught that emotions are something that we just feel because they’re in our head and we’re thinking about them. But when you think about what Candace Pert discovered… Yes, I think we’re so much more than these physical beings right now, but I think a lot of new-age, and even mindfulness, take us too far out of our bodies.

Our bodies are the tool that we have right now to experience that outer world and each other. I think you’re really on to something when you felt you were releasing something and able to take new things in; who can know that to be the truth better than you? You could go to a doctor or a friend or guru or look it up on Google and ask, “Oh, was that this?” And the answer is inside you. If you had the experience that you are releasing something, you are the one that lives in your body. So that means that is what was happening. And I want us to really trust that more.

Robyn: I love your breakdown of what the molecules of emotion might be when you cry and you release emotion, there’s Serotonin in your tears, there’s natural painkillers. There’s, I think you said, Prostaglandin.

It reminds me of my interview of Bruce Lipton, and I swear I still probably get a couple text messages a week, even months later after interviewing him, of personal friends who I didn’t even know were listening to my podcast saying that interview was mind blowing.

One of the many things that he and I covered was, he talked about the actual neurotransmitters and chemicals released when we fall in love and why love is so powerful. Did you interview Bruce Lipton for your docu-series? Tell us a little bit about what the docu-series about. You’re so on the same wavelength as him.

Razi Berry: Yes, I did interview him, and I interviewed him a couple of years ago as well for another project I did.

One of the things I think is so powerful that Bruce says is that he focuses on the belief. He will say he’s not really necessarily a fan of a mantra. He said that if you don’t actually believe the mantra that it’s not going to make a difference. And you’ll just reinforce something, like a nocebo.

He talks also about the difference between placebo and a nocebo, a placebo being a positive belief in healing and a nocebo being a negative belief in healing. We’ve heard stories of when somebody is told, “You have six weeks to live,” and then that’s exactly how long they live.

I think that your mind (which is, guess what, your thinking) yes, your thoughts are energy, but they’re also creating chemical substance in your body that is moving throughout your entire body, through your bloodstream, between nerves synapses. It’s mediating this vibration. And I know you teach a lot about vibration and that you’re an expert in that area. Bruce is… His work is so powerful and I think that what we believe to be true makes such a difference in our physiology. I think that is kind of like a beautiful mystery.

Robyn: It is a beautiful mystery. And I think we’re just starting to peel the layers of the onion off. I know you’ve been super curious about the higher level, more advanced concepts of being well, being healthy.

You and I were talking a little bit ago about how I see these people in my world, they used to come to my lectures, and I would meet them in person, of they’re just doing everything right. And they’re like, “I get my two different kinds of cultured foods from my probiotics every day, I eat a perfect diet,” whatever diet they follow, Vegan or Paleo or whatever, “and I’ve got my root canal teeth removed,” and they’ll tell me all the gadgets they have in their house, “I’ve got the sauna and I’ve got the nontoxic bed and I replaced the carpet in my house with wool carpet.”

We could just go on and on forever. And then they are not in tune at all with their vibration and how much time they spend in low-frequency states like anxiety and fear and anger. And I only know this because I spent years of my life recovering from the first 18 years of abuse.

It took me longer than I wished that it had. I wish I had figured it out sooner, but now I get to help my children sooner with these higher level concepts that you’re trying to teach people in language that we understand (which I appreciate) and interviewing the experts.

 

The “Love Is Medicine Project”

I know you’ve got this docu-series coming up. Let’s tell everybody about it. You can find it, you can jump into it for free I think.

Razi Berry: Yes. It’s the “Love Is Medicine Project” and hopefully people can go to the show notes and get a link.

It’s a seven-day journey to self-healing. Basically it’s many experts sharing some of their story and giving some evidence towards this innate ability to heal. That’s called vibration sometimes, or in naturopathic medicine it’s called the vital force or the life force. Some people call it God and people call it love.

We also explore how you get more in touch, to really listen to ourselves. These are concepts like honesty as medicine for instance, because how often are we just not really honest with ourselves?

I hear time and time again from doctors who go over their cases that sometimes they’ll sit down with a patient and the patient will be like, “Why is this happening?”

And the doctor will say, “Yes, why is this happening?”

Most always people know exactly why they got sick. They know that they should have left that relationship or their job is too demanding or they didn’t stick up for themselves or they haven’t treated the themselves well with movement, or rest, or food. Instead of a lot of summits, which I think are awesome, that give people specific instruction like, this is what you eat, this is how and when to sleep, this is how to detox.

Love Is Medicine more gives people these tools of how to make these subtle switches to start reconnecting with themselves, and their inner wisdom. Because they have to be their own first doctor, reconnecting to nature around them. Because a lot of our disconnection from nature, and of course we’ve talked about things like sunlight and the earth’s biofield and rhythms, and it goes so much deeper than that.

Every cell on your body has a clock in it, every single cell. It’s like an animal, Robyn, who is deprived from their habitat, deprived from their wild. What happens? They get sickly, they get weak, they can’t procreate (I can’t even think of that word right now, that sounded very religious) but they can’t reproduce. They live much shorter lives and they lose their instinct.

When animals are taken out of their natural environment and put in a zoo or something, they lose their instinct. And that’s what happened. It’s happening to us as a humanity.

That’s what the Love Is Medicine Project is about. It’s about inspiring people and giving them hope towards reconnecting to who they really are. So then when they are with their guru or their priest or their doctor, they can take that advice and really sit with themselves and discover what is right for them. And then they can take action.

Robyn: I liked that a lot because there’s a lot of competing information. We’ve never been more in need of a very finely tuned intuition radar in a world where there’s just thousands of voices screaming at us, from all the media that we’re exposed to on the Internet.

Everybody wants to be an influencer, and usually the influence is just a Trojan horse for some product they want to sell. I feel for my followers who ask me, “Hey, what do you think about this person’s advice, and what do you think about that person’s supplement?”

This is a great time for people to plug into your content to learn how to tune their intuition. Our intuition has never been more needed and probably more difficult to access because of all these chaotic wave lengths from all these devices that we have.

A lot of us have 5G rolling in, and 5G isn’t going to go anywhere because there’s too many people who are going to make billions of dollars on it because the Internet of things. Every device is going to be controllable by an app. Smart dishwasher and a smart kitty litter box, just absolutely everything. We have to be protective of getting back to that finely tuned place.

You’re talking about taking animals out of their habitat and how they start to act strangely. And they cannot tap into the things that were so magical about that species. It reminds me of what we did to Native Americans. They were this glorious people who followed the river and they were peaceful people. They were lean and fit and so creative and had this really impressive culture in so many ways.

Then we took them out of their habitat, and we stuck them in row houses and made them stay there and gave them government money. And what happened was a catastrophe. The alcoholism. And we’re just like, “Hey, you can run some gambling, but just stay away from the rivers and don’t touch the buffalo, and you can’t do what you’ve been doing for hundreds of years since before we ever came here.”

We see what happens when we take people away from what nature innately calls them to.

We’re going to put the free opt-in for the docu-series at greensmoothiegirl.com/loveismedicine. greensmoothiegirl.com/loveismedicine. It’ll be in the show notes, but some of you, if you’re like me, I’ll be working out and I’ll write down these links that I want to follow.

I know that my podcast producer, Sue, just launched her own podcast, it’s called A Cup of Joy. Everyone go listen to A Cup of Joy by our podcast producer here at greensmoothiegirl, Sue. It’s absolutely lovely. You’re going to love it.

I would love for you to tell us how tuning into the Love Is Medicine docu-series helps people tap their intuition. Who are some of the people that you interviewed? What are some of the amazing highlights?

Razi Berry: Oh my gosh, so many.

We talked with Dhru Purohit from Broken Brain and he talks about social connections and some of the science behind connecting with each other. We talked to Bruce Lipton about your mindset and belief.

We talked to Diane Kazer about how we have these social constructs of what we need to do to our bodies be loved. She talks about her breast implant illness and how she defined her whole self, her whole self-esteem regarding this silhouette she had. And then she made this brave decision to have them removed and to learn to love her body on its own. We talked to people about disordered eating, which has many different forms, when you just aren’t loving yourself or food the way nature intended it to be.

We talked to Dr. Gabriela Leon, and we talked to Kimberly Jones who is an IFBB pro bodybuilder about how to motivate to make the decisions that your favorite influencer [does]. Maybe you learned something awesome at greensmoothiegirl.com and you haven’t been able to really make those changes.

Some of our experts in the fields of sports and motivation share how they’ve kept it going throughout trying times, like the death of a parent and things like that, and how sometimes doing the things that we think are so hard to do are really the most loving things to do for ourselves.

We talked to Dr. Joan Borysenko, who was one of the new first leaders. She’s a contemporary of Bruce Lipton, who was one of the first leaders to talk about mind-body medicine. She was a Harvard trained doctor.

We talked to Bernie Siegal who is, of course, the author of Love, Medicine and Miracles, who helped people heal miraculously from cancer simply by having them draw pictures and share their stories, which led to the self-awareness of what was happening in their body.

Robyn: That’s really exciting. This is a different kind of documentary or docu-series or summit that people are used to tuning into because it’s next generation kind of stuff. It’s metaphysical, it’s uplifting, it’s going beyond food and functional medicine.

I’m excited for you to bring this new work to the world, my friend

Razi Berry: Robyn, I was a little nervous because it was a risk to not give people specific [orders], like “You take these probiotics and you eat this kind of food.” It’s not quite cut-and-dry like that, but hopefully you’re going to enable people to really be able to make their best decisions based in love.

Robyn: This is for people who aren’t afraid to push the boundaries and learn and love more. And for the seekers, for the truth seekers among us. That’s why I thought of Sue, my podcast producer. I know that when we finish this episode she’s going to be like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to go follow Razi.”

So how does someone find you in other places besides the docu-series? Where are you on social media and all that?

Razi Berry: Thank you Robyn.

I am on Facebook, and Instagram at razi.berry. I know it’s an unusual name but it is my real given name, R-A-Z-I B-E-R-R-Y. And you can also find me on my website, which is naturalpath.net. I have a blog there, and my podcast Love Is Medicine, or you can see here in the interview with you, Robyn; it’s on iTunes and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Robyn: Wonderful.

Thanks so much for being with us, and good luck with the launch of the docu-series.

Razi Berry: Thanks Robyn, I appreciate [it]. You’re really a pioneer in this field of health and as a former psychotherapist, you really understand that mind-body continuum. And I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time. Thank you so much.