How a Nurse Leader Escaped the Burnout Loop

We're constantly under pressure.

“That's why this work is the answer is we want to start changing internally.”

And you're only in charge of what happens in your internal world. So if we get enough people with this dormant, innovative evolution inside them, um, activated, we start to change the game. This is the answer because it's something that can do that more instantaneously than we've ever seen before. Crystal Shepherd is a compassionate, insightful, and transformational hypnotherapist.

Registered nurse in the founder of guiding light. Through her work, she helps people break through limiting patterns, build confidence, and create lasting change using science-based hypnosis and brain-focused techniques. Through the work that I do in higher brain living, we're actually restructuring that physiology, which naturally leads to changes in your life in a natural way.

“What are kind of some of the identifiers for you and someone who is in need of this work?”

When people come to me typically, it's because they have... Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast. Today, I am joined with Crystal Shepherd from a guiding light.

First of all, welcome to the room, welcome to the podcast, how you doing?

I'm doing good, thank you. Good, good. So you just finish your interview. First of all, tell me how you feel now on the other side of it. You know, a new experience for me, but I am passionate about getting my work out to the world, so it's all for the greater good of humanity.

All for a good purpose. I love to hear it. I love to hear it. So Crystal, this is our audience's first time sort of getting to know you.

“So just kind of give me a quick breakdown. Who is Crystal Shepherd?”

Well, I'm also known as the Alcaminers, because I've been a nurse for 25 plus years. Worked in a lot of leadership roles. I own part of a home health organization at one point. And now I've switched over to transformational work. So I work deeper into the body with not just the mind, but the body itself. We have emotional bodies, mental bodies, and spiritual bodies. And if we only attack the physical,

which I learned through my nursing career, and we miss something and really it just leads to looping. There's a lot to understand about the human experience, right? And so I just a little bit of background on me, like I come from a psychology background. So my dad's a world-renowned sports psychologist. He's worked with a lot of the Jamaican Olympic Association. So you

say in bold and all these crazy characters. And one thing that he always breaks down for his

athletes is that your psyche can be split into three. So I like that you broke that down into three as well. Your psyche can be split into three. There's the human, the chimp, and the computer. And the human is responsible for the human is just you. That's your normal day today. The computer is what you program yourself to do. Where your, what are your habits? What are you programming into your daily life? And then the chimp is your emotional brain. The chimp has an emotional

response to everything. The chimp is telling you, "Man, you're not good enough to do that," or "Yeah, this is this sucks. You're having, I'm struggling with this," or "Whatever is going on, that's your chimp talking." And so- >> That's subconscious. >> Yeah, you're subconscious mind. >> I'm reading behind the reader. >> Exactly, exactly. Exactly. So you mentioned that a part of your transformational ethos in your business has to deal with the body, and not so much the mind.

Talk to me a little bit about what are we storing in our bodies that is holding us back and keeping us in sort of survival mode? >> Yeah, so we like to think of memory as being something of the mind, but actually, it imprints throughout our body and physiological structure. It just doesn't

communicate the same way. We forget that our nervous system is actually one of the most important

features to the body, and it regulates your life more so than you'd ever probably imagine. >> I heard an interesting thought on another podcast where somebody brought up that we are essentially just the nervous system. Everything else is kind of just the flesh suit to keep the nervous system safe. Would you agree with that? >> I could definitely get behind a statement like that, absolutely. >> Because if you look at a cross-section of the human mind that leading into the nervous system,

throughout the world. That's how you sense things. Everything else is just a keep that central part safe. Make sure that that is good. >> Yeah, and the big thing is when the lower mind is more in charge, then it restructures your physiology of your body to a certain way of being, and that actually limits the capacities of your own potential as a human being. And so through the work that I do in higher brain living, we're actually restructuring that physiology, which naturally leads to changes in your

life in a natural way. And so we've never seen things like this before. So this is coming out to the

world. And so people might be hearing this for the first time, but we are bioelectric beings. We now know that science tells us that and through a process called using the piezoelectric effect we're able to do things to the body to basically hyper-resource it. And we can direct that energy to the higher centers of the brain. The higher centers of the brain are actually where all your complex thinking goes on. It's also think of it as consciousness expanding itself. So our

“lower brains are great. They're important. They are meant to keep us safe. And that's like their primary”

function. >> Yep. And sameness equals safety, right? So a lot of us like to stay in that little box, but if you mentioned it before, too, the loop. >> Yep. >> The loop is safe. The loop is a sensor. I know it's a loop. >> You know to expect. And so we often function that way because it's safe.

And when we first became humans, that was the first part of the brain to develop. We want to

transcend and include that, but we want to elevate it. We want to be able to recognize when it's operating under the radar and reach higher capacities of what we're capable of. And so in order to do that, we need the energy to be sourced in the right place in the brain. And so through something called the piezoelectric effect, we strike areas rich in collagen, very gently, gentle touch. And we direct that specifically through the fascia, just simple point touches that move through the fascia of the body,

and move into the higher brain centers. When that happens, there's a cascade of things that happen. And so think of it like the butterfly effect. You touch one specific place, and you do that through piezoelectric effect is stretch and compression mechanically to that collagen tissue. And it creates

a ripple effect throughout the body. So even though it's simple, it's doing amazing things to elevate

human beings' potential. >> Got it. It kind of sounds almost adjacent to, I've done this with my dad, but EMDR therapy, which is essentially my, from my understanding of it, I don't have a really a great deep dive on what EMDR is, but when I've done it with him, it involves tapping on certain

“surfaces on the body to release emotional trauma that's being held by the body, right?”

>> Yeah. So this work taps into all of that. So it's incredible when it comes to emotional regulation, creating clarity, and creating more energy, and functioning from a place of expansiveness, and creativeness. All of that is already in you. It's in every human being. We just wake it up. We bring that back online, essentially. So think of it as you have soft, software that needs upgrading. So when you talk about like EFT tapping, or even mindset work, yoga, sound therapy,

breath work, all of that's great, but it doesn't necessarily lead to lasting change in order to do that, we really need the physiology, the body, to restructure. And the body has its own innate intelligence. It knows what to do. So as long as you're energizing what needs to be in charge, which is the

“higher components of our brain, that's what we as human beings are brains developed into that.”

All the way up to the frontal part, the prefrontal cortex. So you hear about third eye crown, all of that. Those areas, normally you'd have to be a yogi, and sit for six hours looking at a flickering candle, or off of the bunnies, in order to have greater insight and these capacities that can come online. We're now doing that in a short time in the necessha on a table through these strategic touchpoints. And it's so fascinating that renounce neuropiantists by the name of Susan

Cook Reuter is following this work, closely, because she wouldn't have believed it if she didn't

found in this work and the different increased capacities of like alpha waves, gamma waves

“in centers of the brain where you'd want to have that happening. Also the left and right”

hemispheres and the way that they're communicating, where normally they don't cross those barriers very easily, is so fascinating that this is the answer to what's going on in our modern world today. The reason why the lower brain is in charge so much is because of the way modern life works. We're constantly under pressure, got to get this done, you know, got to answer these emails, you know, the constant deadline. Yep, deadlines and our minds are constantly going.

And we're also highly dopamine addicted. Yeah, yeah. We're living in a society or at least at a time in history and I think we'll get past it to be fair. But we're living in a time in history where dopamine responses are controlling, they're the incentives by which they're the carrot at the end of the stick that we're following constantly, right? Yeah. So whether it's scrolling on your phone

“or getting a quick snack to eat or whatever can give you that quick dopamine response, that's what”

we're predisposed. That's the the the chip part of the brain is what goes for the quick dopamine. Yeah. And if we can figure out a way for the average person to lower their need for quick dopamine and search for higher elevated responses in dopamine. So like the dopamine response that you get from completing a task or meeting a long standing goal, those kinds of things like if we can train ourselves to kind of move more in that direction, then we move away from the lower brain's

propensity to want to do the low the low risk dopamine things that we do every day. Now you mentioned something earlier that I wanted to kind of touch on. I mentioned something to what you're saying because it really breathed that out for me. You're right, you're asking about like having the world around us to change. That's the problem we can't think that way. That's why this work

is the answer is we want to start changing internally. Mm-hmm. Every internal there's an external

and you're only in charge of what happens in your internal world. So if we get enough people with their this dormant innovative evolution inside them activated, we start to change the game and how humanity actually proceeds in the world. Mm-hmm. And because we have to worry about the instant gratification that we're all now adapted to, this is the answer because it's something that can do that more instantaneously than we've ever seen before. Mm-hmm. And so earlier you mentioned

that that sort of lower brain thinking shows itself in a person's physiology, what are kind of some of the identifiers for you and someone who is in need of this work? Yeah. Well, when people come to me typically it's because they have challenge or a habit or an addiction or something that is affecting their daily moving in life. I would like to get to the point where people don't have to get to that crisis and are seeing me for that, but it's often the gateway or the window

in which they visit me. Mm-hmm. And so then I'm doing hypnosis work through that and we get the results we need and then I introduce the gateway of moving them into the pathway of higher brain living and higher brain living is actually leading you to discovering things about your self that you didn't even imagine were possible. Mm-hmm. So a lot of times we think that we're in this

“trap this is all there is and this is how life is and life seems to be happening to you. But when we”

turn this dormant innovative evolution called inner organic technology on inside you, it's like roaring and things start changing. You just perceive so differently the shifts that happen and they're so natural at the same time. So it doesn't require like the mind to change the mind that's like asking the fox to guard the hunthouse. Mm-hmm. You know, so mindset work is great, but it's often going to take a lot of time, a lot of willpower. And this work we're talking about something

organically naturally, naturally happening just through changing the structure of the physiology in your body. Mm-hmm. Because they go hand in hand, we're not just our bodies and we're not just our minds, we're integral beings and we have to think of it that way. Mm-hmm. And this is this is that new way. Yeah, we're a very inner woven system of mind, body, spirit. All of those things are interwoven within each other. There's no one without the other, right? Correct. You can't have the

mind without the body, you can't have the body without the mind and the spirit is sort of the

cohesion of those two. I want to take a second here. Work your hands first. I'm going to say that

podcast with a client the other day. And we were talking about obviously spirituality and there was

this interesting thought experiment that I saw online recently that's posits that we're actually just kind of the physical body is kind of just an antenna for a frequency that is coming from we don't know where it comes from. But the frequency comes in and this is an antenna that receives that frequency and expresses it out into the physical. And glad you said that because that's exactly what's happening here is when we're hyper-resourcing the body we're kind of upgrading the hardware. So then the

software that's being inputted can work and be managed. So this also enhances anything else you do in life. So if you are someone who likes to meditate, do breath work or yoga, you'll find that those things are enhanced because now the system is primed to receive. We're essentially priming the body to receive at a greater capacity. It's like nutrition even. I'm old enough to remember those TVs back in the day where you had to like move the antenna in a specific way to get the signal to

come in. It's like going from that to like a 5G tower. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We're on your analogy. Yeah.

I want to take a second here to just for the audience guys if you're sticking around at this

point. First of all, make sure that you watch her episode. It's going to be dropping shortly after this podcast episode drops. But for the people out there that are watching this that are entrepreneurs,

“their business owners, they're very growth-minded. What do you have to say to somebody out there”

who is starting a business or working in a business that they've started and who is struggling with this sort of lower mind thinking that's holding them back from what they could be doing? Well, the first thing I'm going to say is it's all part of the journey. The development of the human brain starts as a child where it's still in development. And so you take on ancestral lineage

and things that are happening out in your environment at a time when your brain isn't fully

developed in capacity and those create subconscious ways of being that carry with you. And it's often not until you're in adulthood that you're able and start to explore these things and recognizing these things that are operating under the radar. What I would say is if you're starting

“a business, you need to be regulated. You need a calm nervous system and that's where clarity comes in”

and the decisions you make are sound of judgment and are going to take you to your greatest potential. So I was a high-functioning leader in the nursing world and perhaps to all my nurses. I mean they are the most compassionate professionals that you'll ever meet their tough. Oh, I know it. Trust me, I know it. The things that they see and experience in witness is and sometimes are able to intervene are nothing short of a true hero. And so I can't say enough about them. And I am one.

And what I'll say further though is I operated from a place that I was eventually going to burn out. And you know what happens when you when that occurs is you look for other ways to cope and outlets. And this is why you know someone might turn to drinking or other things, you know, to it. Sometimes it's just habits. So I'll regulate their nervous system. Yeah. The nervous system. So this tool is I can't say enough about it. This is meant for high-functioning adults and entrepreneurs

and those who are, you know, trying to take in greater capacities. This is the way. It's funny. I interview, you know, so so many entrepreneurs, high achievers on this show. It becomes more and more apparent with every interview that I do. But you have to be able to function at a high clip to be able to be successful as an entrepreneur. A lot of people, their preconception, because they see entrepreneurial endeavors on the other side of it, right? They see the successful part.

And once you become successful as an entrepreneur, the highest level of success as an entrepreneur is to delegate all of the things that you don't want to do so that you can act in your zone of genius, right? And so what that looks like outwardly to people out there who are just seeing entrepreneurs on social media or wherever they're seeing them is it outwardly presents as, oh, you get to live this great life and you make all this money and you get to go to the gym every morning and you get to,

“you get to, you know, sleep in or if you need to or whatever, you have all this freedom, right?”

But what it actually is is that it takes operating at such a high clip to get to that point

that other people are better in so that you can focus on your zone of genius. It requires a lot. And we don't give enough credit to entrepreneurs and business owners in that

“the level that you need to, you're, I mean, I opened a business last year. I was doing”

90 hour weeks every week for six months straight to get it just to be profitable, not to mention highly profitable enough for me to make an exit, but it was, it was a grind. It was an incredible grind. Now imagine if you had your inner technology lit up, the whole idea is that you move from this survival style to like having more clarity, energy, you need that energy when you're an entrepreneur and you're just getting started. So it's a lot to, you need it when you're just getting started.

It's always moving. It's operating. That is miles a hour. Yeah, constantly thinking because there's

all these moving parts and we need to be able to deal with those complexities coming in. And that's where this work is profound. For my final question, if you could give a message out there to all of our listeners, anybody that's tuned in to the show right now, what would that message be? If we just treat the symptom, you miss the whole system to really stand in your power.

“You need to have a regulated nervous system, higher brain living's the answer.”

I say this all the time to just to kind of piggyback off of that, but like you have to address root cause. You can't get, we have a weird relationship. I feel like nowadays between

cause and effect. We get mad at the effect, but we never trace it back to its actual root cause.

We usually find like an easy to cure cause halfway along the way, but we never trace it back to the root. So I'm glad that you brought that up. Guys, if you're still tuned in at this point

“in the episode, make sure that you check out her episode, which will be coming out shortly”

thereafter, where can people find you on social media? Yeah, so I have a Facebook page and you can find me at Facebook.com/gitinglight138. And you can also find me on my website, which is the guiding light 1111.com. And in there, you can find plenty of information as well about the science of how this works and all the studies behind it. And I look forward to working with you

with this resonates. And with that guys, again, I'll say here, it's been an incredible pleasure

having you on the pod. It's been a wonderful conversation. Make sure, I try. I make, I make an attempt, I make an attempt. But make sure you guys follow her wherever it is that she is to be followed. This has been an immense joy. Thank you so much for being on the show with us. And with that, that is another episode of the Living Your Legacy Podcast. Again, I'm your host Jason Tyler. And I'll catch you guys in the next one.