Ep. 149: What I learned on My Swiss Retreat This Year with Robyn Openshaw

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robyn: Hey everyone. It’s Robyn Openshaw. I’m the Green Smoothie Girl and your host of the Vibe show.

Not long ago, I got home from my annual liver detox retreat.

I lead a retreat in the southern Swiss Alps at this amazing clinic of biological medicine, which has been renamed to be the Swiss Mountain Clinic. It was founded by Dr. Thomas Rau, who is probably the most famous living doctor of biological medicine. He was the founder. It’s now another medical doctor who trained under him for eight years who owns the clinic.

I’m soon going to do an episode on my 20 clinics all over the world that I flew around researching at for three and a half years. I intended to write a book about it. I was going to write a book about what people are doing to treat cancer worldwide that’s outside the Standard-of-Care Protocols of surgery, chemo, and radiation.

I ended up not writing that book. That’s a whole other side story. But I found this clinic and it was the best of the 20 clinics that I went to. It’s where I would send my own family members — I have sent my own family members in the last eight years since I met them — and in the last eight years, we’ve not only started doing liver detox retreats there because they have a very dialed-in program where you flush your gallbladder and liver. With over 500 ways that your liver serves you, you definitely get 500 or more benefits. Some people actually, some doctors, think that the liver performs closer to 2000 different functions for us.

We all get together for a week and those who can stay for a second week get deeper treatment. We just have an amazing time together getting a great liver flush going on. We eat a perfect diet for that. We do 20 different diagnostics and treatments towards the liver flush, but also to give people great clues about their health so they can leave with some direction.

They also leave with a plan to follow. Those involve some really interesting supplement protocols, some of which you can’t even get in the United States, from our German doctors of biological medicine over there. Every year — I work very closely with the clinic all year round — we have program upgrades every year and this year, instead of getting one coffee enema a week delivered by a nurse who comes to your room and brings you all the materials and makes it really easy for you, I had them give everybody a coffee enema kit and be able to administer it. They had everything they need to be able to administer it to themselves in the comfort of their own rooms, every day of the week.

I was really excited about that because coffee enemas (if you’ve never done one before, if you’ve never heard such a crazy thing, I did not make this up, clinics all over the world use this) they’re phenomenal for people with pain. It’s phenomenal for people detoxing. It’s incredible for cancer patients; it helps get rid of the tumor tissue as it breaks down in holistic cancer treatments that are doing a number of things. Strengthening the immune system and tearing down those aberrant growths that we’ve got to get rid of with cancer. The coffee enemas I was really excited about.

They had two different infrared saunas there, nice big ones, and you could schedule it so nobody had to wait around for their time with the sauna. Everybody got their sauna time in. That was a nice program upgrade.

They had also invested in two bemers, which is PEMF technology, where you lay on a mat and it’s massively increasing microcirculation. So good against inflammation, and so useful for oxygenating, alkalizing the whole body. I had gotten one about a year ago. I was really excited about it. We got everybody on the bemer mat twice a day and that was a really cool program upgrade.

The program for next year — when you hear this, I don’t know if we’ll have our dates on it for next year — but I’m going next year, May 23rd and I’m only going to stay for two weeks because I think I might come back in the fall and do another two weeks. Haven’t decided yet. But if you want to come with me in 2020 the dates are going to be May 23rd for two weeks.

The page that you can learn about it (we’ll see if by the time you hear this, we’ve got the new dates in it for next year) it’s at greensmoothiegirl.com/swissmountainclinic. This year I did three weeks — and we made a couple mistakes and we didn’t quite fill the third week — but usually the whole thing fills up in two weeks. That is what has happened to several years before that. So you don’t want to waste time.

When I do announce it, when I go live with a webinar about it, it will likely be full in two weeks. Again, greensmoothiegirl.com/swissmountainclinic is how to get your spot. You put $1,000 down if you’re ready to book your spot. The bemer — if you were with us at the retreat, I led about 60 or 70 different people, some for just one week, some stayed for two weeks, a couple of them even stayed for three weeks, we’ve never seen anybody stay for three weeks for our retreats before — if you want the link to get the bemer on a discount, this PEMF mat I was mentioning, it’s greensmoothiegirl.com/bemer. Greensmoothiegirl.com/bemer.

The People I Met On Our Swiss Mountain Clinic Liver Detox Retreat

I wanted to tell you a little bit about the people who came and what the medical doctors there and I have cooked up for next year that’s going to change. I think is going to be really, really cool. Probably a little premature for me to talk about this until we totally dial in the changes in the program, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. Kind of a preliminary way, but I’m always so excited that people are so courageous that, even though they haven’t met me in person, the vast majority of them, they booked this trip and they get on a plane and they come all the way across the world to not just spend time with me, but to have a healing experience as a group.

Many of them are ill or they are suffering in a variety of ways and they might look and act healthy, but they’re a little bit nervous about their health. Everyone has a conversation that they want to have with me about their health.

I’ll share a little bit about some of them.

There were about six women who came with us who are in their twenties, and traveling alone, and most of them have had significant health challenges. One had even had cancer, a couple of them actually. One of them was an American living in Slovenia who is very anxious about health challenges that she’d been having.

I had about eight married couples where both of them came.

Mostly though everybody else were married women who’ve been following GreenSmoothieGirl, and either they drag their husbands along, or a lot of them came on their own.

And then of course there were also some older single women, single or divorced. Kind of more women in my category.

Two different women were cancer patients who opted out of the chemo and radiation approach and brought their husbands. And in both cases, these husbands who came along with them had just raved to me about how much better they feel eating the cancer-beating diet that their wives were on. Both of these guys were so supportive of their wives that they pretty much went on the juicing, raw, Vegan — or very close to Vegan — diets that their two wives were on.

I was really inspired by that, by these couples. Both of them, both of these couples, it was their second marriage. And that that’s inspiring to me too, when people get it right the second time. One of the couples are missionaries in Thailand and they’re raising seven kids over in Thailand. They’re only there part of the year. Then they have staff the rest of the year. But he did not have children of his own. She had raised four children and then she married him, and they live in an RV when they’re home here in the US. For 20 years they had lived in an RV. They just moved into a place in Northern California, but half the time they’re in Thailand doing God’s work over there.

There is an Indian couple who came; they live in Michigan, he’s an E.R. Doctor. And any impression you may have if you think that doctors are arrogant, think they have all the answers, they have more education than the rest of us — he didn’t have any of that vibration at all. He was so open and humble and kind and I just loved hearing about what he’s doing with his life, and what they both are doing with their lives.

He had been told in his early thirties that he had cancer, and he spent, I believe, almost two months thinking he had cancer until they finally figured out his diagnosis was actually an autoimmune disease. But during that process, his wife found me online, and they turned his health around eight years ago.

And lately he slipped back. He got a lot better from doing the green smoothies and eating a whole foods diet, but then he slipped back into habits that are easy to do when you’re in that super busy clinical setting and working long hours. But five times a year — and these folks are not old, they’re younger than I am — five times a year, they make the sacrifice to go on medical missions to the Philippines. They have two teenage sons. And then six years ago they adopted a biracial daughter who is half black and half white, and it looks like she’s going to be a foot taller than both of her parents. She’s really athletic, and they’re just enjoying letting her become who she supposed to be.

I was so impressed with these people and so many others who came with us. In fact, I had to drop a whole page of notes I took about some of the other amazing people I met and I can’t touch on all of them, there are so many.

This E.R. doctor’s wife — her name is Rosie — she said to me, “Your work has changed our lives.” And I still to this day feel very emotional about that. I love when you tell me that on social media, and then it just adds a whole other dimension when I get to meet someone in person and they share with me what my written body of work has done, or my lecture tour, wherever it is that you found me — on YouTube, my videos — if my work has made a difference in your life (as I tell you often that I love to read your reviews on iTunes), I’m just so very grateful. So very grateful.

There was another couple who are from Florida, and they’re seventh day Adventists and he’s also an E.R. doctor. It’s so funny because when we were there the first day and we had a meeting and everybody introduced themselves, I was like, “Hey, did I meet you at my Florida event? And did you tell me like five years ago that you were coming?”

Sure enough, it was the couple that I had remembered from I think Orlando or Tampa, and I remembered he was an E.R. doc and they said they were coming with me to Switzerland. And only took him five years [laughter] but they did show up.

There was a mother and daughter who came, and the daughter is one of the most pure and sweet people I’ve ever met. She’s a special needs 29 year old young woman from Texas. And she had Williams Syndrome, which is quite rare. I think they used to think it was down syndrome, but milder, higher functioning than downs. And so I of course went and looked up on the internet and learned as much as I could because her mom asked me to talk to her about her diet. Because it’s a 29 year old, but when she’s developmentally delayed, she’s going to think more like a teenager.

And you know how when we have teenagers, we have to really link our council to them about diet and other lifestyle choices to things they care about.

I kind of tapped into my experience in trying to help my teenage children make good choices, even though mostly what teenagers do when their parents tell them anything is roll their eyes.

But this woman had been a teenage mother and somehow went on to get a college degree while having these two little children. And then two years ago, her husband, who was a sheriff, got in a car accident. And then after the death of her husband, six months later, she was treated for brain cancer.

It just really made me reflect a lot on how these parents, who have sort of an eternal teenager on their hand, are such heroes. I really reflected on that a lot because I had been so ready to see my youngest son out the door a year ago.

[My son] graduated high school and he was excited to get out on his own. I was excited to be an empty nester — I think I did a podcast episode and expressed my angst over it — but I was 50% sad and 50% giddy. You know, I just get to have my life to me again. I was excited to discover what that even means after giving the last 25 years of my life [to my kids]. My highest priority was always these other four people I was responsible for.

Watching this mother and daughter — and here she is a single parent too and with her own major health challenge — it was very humbling for me to watch her and realize that she will always be a caretaker.

I’m grateful for the time I had parenting and I am also so very grateful that my children are off adulting. It makes me feel almost guilty that I get to have parenting be mostly a season.

Both my kids are off in southern California this summer. As I’m recording this, I’m going to get on a plane and go spend the weekend with them in L.A. with the two of them, Emma and Tennyson, like I did last summer, only last summer I flew into LAX, which was heinous. I do not like that airport and I do not like driving around Orange County.

This time I’m flying into a different airport and we’ll be hanging out in Irvine for the same reason as last year. As you know, if you’ve heard my story of my “Wife Swap” episode by now, I talk about how ABC wanted to string me up for forcing all my children to celebrate their birthdays on the same day (which wasn’t actually true). I’m going out there to celebrate their two birthdays with them like I did last year and we’re going to go whale watching in a kayak. That’s our big plan. We’re going go to Disneyland for one day.

I have really watched my kids with great joy in their highs and lows of doing summer sales. There’s whole days or weeks where they don’t sell anything and they’re out in the hot sun, in their itchy uniform, getting rejected right and left. And it’s been painful at times, when both of them have called me very emotional and very upset. Sometimes they’re upset because they had to co-manage the office together, which was Emma’s brilliant idea to do that… I don’t think Tennyson’s necessarily capable of that at the age of 18, turning 19.

I’ve watched my kids really grow this summer. My daughter has had to dig deep as a manager and realize management is not easy. You have to work with people’s personalities and their moods and their strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve just been reflecting on all of this this summer, in this new phase of parenting for me, and I’m getting to spend some quality time for two weeks with a mother whose parenting will never be done. And Danielle’s mom is a saint.

I ran into Danielle in the hallway because every time she saw any one of us, she was the most loving person ever. She always wanted to give us a hug and ask us how we are, just the sweetest, most kind, solicitous way about her. I ran into her in the clinic one day and I asked her if she missed home and she said “Yes, I miss my friends.” And I said, “Which of your friends is the very best one?” And she said, “Jesus.” It just came right out of her mouth. Oh, so adorable.

Dr. Petra this year — she’s turning 60, she has the health and vibrancy of a 40 year old — she is on a tear right now about parasites. What we’re working on next year is that everybody who comes for the first week does the liver detox, just like now, which is great prep. But then the second week they do mostly more diagnostics to send people home with a protocol to kill parasites.

She was telling me — Dr. Petra — about how her research is going into where they are. They’re in the gut, they’re in the pancreas, they cross the blood brain barrier. They’re in the brain, they’re in the liver, there’s eggs and larva in addition to these parasites. Virtually everyone has them, and they come from different places. But when we get overloaded that with them, just like with the bacterial and viral load she’s worked on for many years with people, they can really take your immune system down when you have too high of a load.

I’m sure that there’s nobody in the Western world who doesn’t have some parasites, but some of us are absolutely fighting parasites at all times. Some of us have two foot long parasites in us and that’s a lot related to some diet and lifestyle issues.

When I left there, she and Dr. Frederica, her daughter — who’s also a medical doctor, specialized in internal medicine and also a biological medicine doctor, or Europe’s version of functional medicine doctor — they were getting ready to put on a conference where they had functional medicine doctors from all over the world flying in. Slovenia, U.S., Germany, all coming in to collaborate on sharing methods for killing these parasites.

Because right now, you just have to put people on antibiotics and it’s the only drug that I’ve seen Dr. Petra prescribe. She’d always rather avoid the side effects of drugs and she has a much lower dose, occasional antibiotic protocol that she uses on parasites.

She says though that in 10 years she wants energy medicine. She wants killing frequencies, the exact killing frequencies that kill parasites. She wants that to be her only way of killing parasites. Maybe supplements too, but she wants to be not using any antibiotics before she’s done with her research and her clinical testing. I think that would be very exciting.

She uses patient report of symptoms. She uses meridian testing, she uses stool sample testing, and she’s using some energetic testing which will be pretty unfamiliar to your standard-of-care, regular Western medicine doctor.

There was a woman there who had breast cancer and her husband was her second husband. And he had lost his first wife to breast cancer. The thing is though, people will say, “I lost my wife to breast cancer,” but they don’t tell you that they may have — and this was the case with this gentleman — [really] died of radiation.

After you get that high dose radiation, for many people, those rays and those isotopes just keep burning and burning and burning. His first wife had not actually died of breast cancer. She had died of the side effects of the treatment. And so here he is with his second wife who they’ve been married for, I want to say, 20 something years. She was a young mother with five little kids, and he was not a dad, and he stepped in and he helped her raise her five children.

So, lots of heroes. I’m telling you, I’ve met lots of heroes. And I’m just scratching the surface. I could go on and on about the incredible stories of overcoming tribulation and becoming such phenomenal people through our challenges that I got to experience in Switzerland.

You probably think that I’m there for helping people detox their liver. What I get from it is so much more than that. I meet people who humble me to my knees, and I feel emotional every day. I just feel so blessed and grateful that I get to be in the presence of some of the most phenomenal people I’ve ever met.

Not only did this man help — Liz is her name — raise five children to adulthood and they still consider him their father because their real father did nothing for them after they were little kids and their parents split up. Liz, who’s a nurse, had been following me and knew what was going on over there at Swiss Mountain Clinic. I think it was probably a financial sacrifice for them to go there. She wasn’t there for my retreat, but she was there when we were there.

She was there for, I think she was there for four weeks. I’m sure it was a financial sacrifice for them. They’re working people. But when she was diagnosed, he was so secretly, at first, happy that she chose to go a different route than the chemo and radiation route or the just surgical and radiation route. He was there just totally supportive of her. What a lovely guy. I really enjoyed her too. She had lots to say about how everything was run there and contributed some to some improvements I think that we’ve made to the program.

I gave three talks while I was there. On week one I gave a talk on biological dentistry and electromagnetic frequencies, or electrosmog, and how best to protect yourself from it. And I gave a talk on how to have healthy hormones even in midlife.

On week two I talked about the supplement industry. Every week listened to what everybody’s interested in and the questions they’re asking me. And I talked about the supplement industry, and how to develop good critical thinking skills with the supplement protocols that everybody and their dog wants to sell you. And, what I think the good, bad and ugly is in the supplement industry.

I talked about the influencer industry and how not everybody out there is going to lead you down a good path. I told them how I have observed the influencer industry. I’m an influencer as well. I’m talking about people who are authors, podcasters, bloggers, people you follow on social media because you think they’re smart and you think that they have subject matter expertise that you can trust. I talked to them about some influencers I really like a lot and that I trust and that I follow because that’s what the people in week two were asking me a lot about. And it’s just one that I almost always get asked when I’m there and we’re sitting together having lunch or dinner.

In week three I talked about re-entry, how to go back to real life and keep the gains of the liver detox and how to bring your family along when you’re making healthy changes. But you’ve got some family members who just aren’t into it. It’s a subject I’ve addressed on this show before too, isn’t it?

Some Products From My Swiss Mountain Clinic Liver Detox This Year

I talked about some of the products that they have over there in Switzerland that I really, really like. There’s a set of products I’m going to be bringing over because I think they’re just phenomenal, that Dr. Petra has developed. It’s three different things that are alkaline-forming in the body. My boyfriend is totally in love with the powder.

You add a little spoonful of this powder to water, stir it up, and drink it. It’s pretty much a tasteless flavor lists and his achy joints go away within half an hour, which is what I told him would happen. He’s using it every day, and he’s using mine up really fast, faster than I would, because he loves it. So there’s the alkaline mineral powder to put in water that really brings your inflammation down quickly. You can use it three or four times a day if you want.

Then there’s an alkaline tea and there’s an alkaline bath soak, and I’m going to be importing those products by the beginning of 2020, if not sooner. So watch for that.

Those are some of the products that they have over there that I think are really, really cool and I haven’t seen anything like it over here.

There’s also a new coffee enema delivery system. We literally cannot find it in the United States and it’s just a squeeze bottle kind of thing. You can literally put the whole enema, whether it’s water to flush out the bottom part of your colon or the coffee that you then put in to just hold for 10 to 12 minutes, you can deliver that coffee enema in a matter of 30 seconds. It’s amazing. Just painless, easy, inexpensive.

We’re going to be able to make this because it literally does not exist for purchase in the United States. When we went to the company in Europe and asked them if we could import it they said no, that their business license doesn’t cover it. And I’m like, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have to make it.” And this instant two teaspoons of organic, green, unroasted coffee in a blend with charcoal. I think that’s so much nicer than having to brew organic coffee and bring it to room temperature.

So between those two products, I think it’s going to make our coffee enemas just so much easier and better in a variety of ways for our upcoming detox.

Coming up, we’re supporting a big one with thousands of people, like we always do, 1st of January in 2020. I hope to have those coffee enema products in place by then.

A little personal and business report of what it was like at the liver detox weeks this year. I hope that you can come next year. If you want to come with me, my summer trip is May 23rd for two weeks. You can come for one week or two, but I hope you come for two.

But if you want to come sooner, if you want to come in 2019, guess what? My colleague Tom O’Bryan is leading weeks from October 20th to November 3rd this year. My colleague Magdalena’s coming right up — probably too late for you to book hers — and Dr. Jill Carnahan, I love her too. You would be well-served at any of theirs; you can check out those dates for this year.

And maybe by the time you’re hearing this podcast episode, we’ll have my dates for next year in May. The link is greensmoothiegirl.com/swissmountainclinic.

Thanks for tuning in to this report about how everything went in Switzerland this last summer. And I will see you next time.