Wellness Doc to Hollywood’s Biggest Stars, Dr. Matea

Transcript

Matea, it’s great to have you on the show.

It’s great to be here.

Let’s talk first of all about Myers Cocktail. What is it and why should I have one?

Myers Cocktail is basically a vitamin IV. We’re giving vitamins but putting them into your bloodstream. Not a shot in your butt or your arm, it’s intravenous fluids. It started over 50 years ago and it was started by an MD who is from Stanford. It is interesting because it’s considered a holistic thing but it was a medical doctor who started it. His name was Dr. Myers. That’s why we named it after him.

This is something that you offer your clients, right?

Yes, I do. What’s in the formula varies from doctor to doctor. It’s not one standard formula but it’s well-known and I do a lot of them. I’ve done over 10,000 of them.

You must have evolved your formula or your secret recipe over the years?

Yes. A lot of doctors follow what they’re trained to do in seminars, but I innovate and try things to have my own formulas.

Can you give us a sampling of some of the things that might go into your version of a Myers Cocktail? You don’t have to share any secrets or anything.

At the beginning of my practice, I didn’t want to advertise. That was so hectic and I didn’t want the website to be known. When I started Instagram, a lot of doctors especially surgeons started following me, and so I teach them how to do vitamin therapy. I’m open. It depends on the person. I call them my turbo charge. The basic one has magnesium, calcium, zinc and B-complex. I put in magnesium and calcium. I put in all the Bs. A lot of people use a couple of them. I put in B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7 and B12. B7 is biotin for hair growth and then I put selenium, which is helpful for a lot of reasons in the body. Selenium, zinc, germanium, is an antacid which is cool, I put that in a lot. I create my IVs differently because I alkalinize all those.

I’ve worked with Dr. Young who is the author of The pH Miracle. When I was working there, I started working on the pH. If you look at all IV bags, they’re at a pH of 5.5 where the blood is at 7.365. We’re trying to do something good for your body but we’re acidifying it. I add sodium bicarbonate, which is baking soda to all of my IVs to buffer them and there’s pretty much nobody doing that. People don’t look at that, they’re not trained to that, they don’t think about it. I feel it took my results to a new level and helped people tremendously.

How do you measure the results? Do people just feel better or can you quantify it? How does that work?

One of my friends wanted to cover me when I travel and to work with me and I said, “I don’t do the regular protocols. You have to do this.” She was like, “I don’t want to do that. That’s not how I was trained.” I was like, “Are people picking you up on a private jet to give them this and fly you around the world?” I don’t know how I would describe it. Most people in the original protocol say, “Come and get one,” and be like, “Thanks.” Vitamins are like putting money in your bank account. We call them the currency of energy. If you’re fatigued and we give you an IV drip, it should give you more energy. A lot of times people especially if you’re healthy will just be like, “That was nice. We feel a little relaxed.” The next day you feel a little more energy. When I started alkalinizing them and I give a little bit higher doses and the more depleted you are, the more dramatic you’re going to feel it. People would call me the next day and be like, “Can you fly here? I feel amazing.” My practice has always been busy so I think that doctors should pay attention to it.

You fly around in private jets and work with some of the biggest superstars in the world. Is there anybody that you could name or everybody has to be super confidential and secret?

Super confidential and secret. Nobody wants anyone to know what their secret sauce is.

These are megastars like people who are on stages, performing in front of maybe tens of thousands of people.

I asked one of my rockstars. I was like, “What’s your biggest concert?” He was like, “250,000 people.” I was like, “Are you kidding?” I remember when I saw Peter Gabriel when I was growing up. That was my first concert and it was at UB stadium and there were I think 7,000 people. I thought that was huge. Try to imagine 250,000, that’s out of hand. That’s crazy. I’ve supported four of the biggest world tours, top grossing net. They usually book around 81 shows and they’re doing a show two in a row with the day off and it’s an intense schedule. I give them IVs but more popular now, IVs are invasive, it’s expensive but I do a lot of vitamin injections that’s my favorite thing to put people on.

I teach people how to give the vitamin shot at home. It’s great if you get a drip but what are you going to do 30-days of the month? The IV last up to seven days depending on your body. Some people last two or three, some people you can see an immediate drop off of their energy when it wears off. I started doing initially what I called fat burner injections for weight loss and you’re supposed to come twice a week. Nobody can get into the office twice a week, so I said, “People take insulin shots at home. Let them do their own vitamin shots,” and that’s popular. I joked in Hollywood that I feel like I’m the pot supplier. We get a call and they’re like, “Can you deliver them here?”

Why are they called fat burner injections? Is it because you lose a lot of weight from this?

I hate that name because it sounds cheesy, but they’re officially called lipotropic injections. Three of the ingredients help you metabolize fat. Metabolize is more correct versus burn because I don’t know if you ever burn anything but use it as fuel. It helps the liver metabolize fat. All fat has to get processed to your liver. Methionine, inositol and choline help the liver metabolize fat and the results can be amazing. It depends on how much you have to lose. The last ten is the hardest for people to lose. I’m working on my last fifteen pounds. I’ve got a weight issue my whole life and that last ten to fifteen is so stubborn. If people are bigger, the more they have to lose the faster it comes off, the easier. It should be combined with a diet and exercise plan. I do have people that lose weight by doing those and I’m always amazed because I think you should be in both.

It’s funny because every few years somebody convince me to have a sale or something. If I sign up a whole bunch of new people when I’m taking their history I go, “Are you on any diet or exercise plan?” They are like, “No.” I just laugh and I’m like, “Everyone knows you have to diet and exercise if you’re going to lose weight. This should be part of it.” They’re hoping for a miracle where they don’t have to work at it. You should be doing diet and exercise. My camera lady, my videographer, she started on them and she lost nine pounds in three weeks. I was really shocked. Even my other assistant and he’s not on a diet. I see him at the Taco Truck. He’s eating his burritos and he lost seven pounds for not doing much of anything. It’s pretty amazing. They’re very popular.

How do you price this? Is it only for clients that you’re seeing or can you buy this stuff online? How does all that work?

I have them on my website and you have to become a patient. Although we don’t do as in-depth of a history and exam if you’re doing that. I do a lot of health makeover let’s say. If I’ll have an actor that’s preparing for an action film and they have to make their weight and look ripped, that’s a longer intake. It usually takes two hours because I go through their whole health history. I explain my philosophy and the treatments. To do vitamin injections, I’ll do 20 to 30 minutes consultation and then we set them up on the shots. We make sure they know how to do them and then follow up. That’s a lot simpler. The main thing I treat is stress. I treat healthy people but I help them to manage stress and avoid burnout and to have endurance. I love working with athletes. Those are my favorite clients. I had a guy who ran a marathon and he placed fourth. He did an IV and took some vitamin injections. He did 60% of what I said to do. He called a week later and he was like, “I placed fourth. If I had done everything you said, I probably would have placed first.” It’s amazing to show how important vitamins are but people don’t take them seriously.

What would be the major vitamins to focus on for treating stress?

B vitamins. The more stress you’re under, the more B vitamins you burn up. You can take a B-complex, you can take a sublingual. If you take orally, it might be as little as 1% absorbed. I hate to say that but it takes about two months of a very consistent use when you go on vitamin pills to notice something. When you get a shot, you notice immediately. I give the analogy of if you had a health bank account, like your financial bank account. If your health bank account is overdrawn, taking supplements is almost giving you $25. Are you going to feel rich? No, you could get a reel out of it. After two months you feel like you’ve got a few dollars in your pocket. Taking the vitamin injection is like putting $1,000 in your health bank account. You will feel it immediately and then IV is like $10,000. It’s just the dramatic difference in absorption.

What’s the pricing for getting an IV, your version of the Myers Cocktail and all that? Are we talking about $1,000 to see you or $10,000 or $200? What’s the pricing?

The lipotropic injections, my favorite formula is $60. They range like my B-complex because I use all the Bs is $40. My pre-workout, my most favorite injection that’s turbo and everything is $100 per injection. Initial consultation, I charge $500 an hour. It’s like $250 fee an hour. Sometimes if people buy a months’ supply, I waive the consultation fee. I don’t make it very difficult for them. For IV, my practice has been closed on a wait list. I only take one or two new clients a year for the IV therapy because my clients book me up. It all depends on my availability. The IVs are generally, if you come to me, it’s $500. If I come to you, it starts around $1,200 per treatment.

Plus, you’ve got to have a private jet.

That’s a bonus. You travel a lot. It’s a game-changer when you fly. You don’t stress, you don’t have to wait, no security, just play your 4X4 up to the plane. You hop in and you get ready to go. There’s a car waiting. I don’t want to talk so much about that because I don’t want to sound like a brat. I’m a down to Earth person. It tickles me. I remember when MTV came out when I grew up and every epic video, we were by the TV and popcorn. I can’t believe I’m treating the people that I saw on TV. It’s a different world. It’s fun. We all have the same issues. People have stress, insomnia, anxiety and self-image issues. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a secretary or whether you’re a superstar, we all are trying to keep our body energized and meet all our responsibilities. We all have the same challenges pretty much.

Let’s talk about some of those challenges. Maybe let’s start with insomnia. Somebody is not getting enough sleep. First of all, probably they should be measuring how much sleep they’re getting. For example, I have an Oura Ring that tracks my sleep. Some people use a Fitbit, some people will use their cell phone and use a particular app. I had a Zeo for many years but they went out of business sadly. That was nerdy-looking of me to have this thing strapped on my forehead at night. Not a good look if you’re interested in having some intimate time. It’s fascinating to see how much deep sleep you get, how much REM sleep, light sleep and all that. Peter Drucker said famously, “What gets measured, gets managed.” If you’re not measuring how much sleep you’re getting, how do you know what’s working and what’s not working of all the different treatments and therapies you’re trying? The first step I think is to start measuring but you can weigh in with a different opinion if you have one. I would love to hear what are some of the treatments that are the most effective for insomnia?

I have about eight tools that I like to use for people. It’s huge. It’s so important. It’s one of the major focuses on my practice. If you can’t sleep, you can’t repair and rest. You can’t be in peak shape and you can’t function at your best. That’s one of the first places I start. It’s very challenging because a lot of people, a lot of professionals especially when they fly a lot, I don’t know about you but traveling makes you irregular and it makes it hard to manage your sleep. I’m going to talk about what the average person can do at home, not like IVs but just to show ahead.

The first time I had a patient come in with a sleep app, the graph of her sleep was like a zigzag, up down, up down, so many times up in the night, very hardly any REM sleep. We gave her 1,000 milligrams of magnesium in a Myers Cocktail, which takes ten to fifteen minutes. Then she had flat, deep REM sleep for the next seven days. You could see it slowly starting to creep up as it wore off. It’s so impressive when you see the numbers because she tried a bunch of stuff and never seen that dramatic result. The first one I start was magnesium. I have people take magnesium before bedtime, 200 to 400 milligrams. If you’re stressed, being in a sympathetic overdrive is a problem. That’s one of the reasons why people don’t sleep. I’ll have a day where I’m running around for eighteen hours and I hardly ever take a break. I sometimes have bad habits like I’ll eat my food while I’m looking at the computer reading email. You’re not relaxing during the day and that’s not how we’re meant to be.

If you’re like that, when you lay down, it could take up to an hour for people’s muscles to unwind. We call magnesium the magic mineral. It’s a muscle relaxant. It’s so simple. It’s inexpensive. My favorite brand is Biotics Research. It’s called Mg-Zyme. You can get it on Amazon. It’s one of the cleanest companies. I’ll have people take 200 milligrams with meals and then 200 milligrams to 400 milligrams at bedtime. It’s subtle slow over time. You’re going to feel like what I call less boulders in your shoulders. It’s a muscle relaxant and it’s inexpensive and powerful. That’s the first place I start. I don’t like magnesium oxide or citrate because they open up the bowels. They can give you loose stools. I know some people like to use that if they have constipation but I like to use other things for that. I like magnesium glycinate. It is one of my favorite forms of it.

It sounds simple and silly but I use Rescue Remedy. It’s a flower essence and it’s energetic. We don’t take it seriously because it’s energy, it’s not like a vitamin but it tells your soul to sleep. Then the thing I have people do is an herbal formula. I like liquids. They’re more potent than capsules. The category of herbs are nervines. I have a formula that I label and that I make. It’s my custom formula. It’s from an amazing wildcrafted herbs from an amazing herbalist I know. I sell that but you can get any of them. What I find is a lot of people go to the health store and they’re like, “I tried that stuff. It didn’t work.” I’m like, “You weren’t taking the right product at the right dose because herbal nervines are amazing.” A lot of people take too little. I’m stronger with the dosing. Liquid tinctures are more potent than capsules and so I use a liquid tincture. My favorite nervine is Melissa or Lemon Balm. It’s a simple weed that’s growing by my mailbox. It’s amazing how this plant can relax your whole nervous system. I had some people with PTSD from being either in the service or working with the military. I had a guy call me who was captured and tortured in Iraq and he was on Trazodone and all kinds of sleeping pills, and a simple little Lemon Balm helped him get off his medication. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it.

I usually use like a synergistic formula with Lavender, California poppy, oats Avena, Ashwagandha. We use all these Lemon Balms and skullcaps. Skullcaps are good herbs. I tell people, “You can go to your average health store and say, ‘Where are your sleep formulas but do you have any liquids?’ They’re called nervines and they are for relaxation?” We use some of the same herbs during the day, if you have really busy days. Like, I do cool things. I’ll be backstage at the Grammys or TV shows or films where there’s high intensity. A live TV especially is intense. It’s fun but when you have that tension, once you learn how to carry your body in a relaxed way in spite of tension, work becomes happy and joyful. When you’re tense in an unrelaxed way, that’s when people snap at each other. They yell and it becomes unpleasant. Simple nervine herbs, you can take them all day and at bedtime especially if you have a stressful job.

Ashwagandha is one of those nervine herbs?

Ashwagandha is considered an adaptogen. When we’re dealing with stress, I treat both with adaptogens and nervines and some of them are both. They’re like a cross between. I’ll have people take adaptogen herbs in the morning and then nervine herbs in the sleep. Adaptogens are ginseng, Rhodiola, Ashwagandha but sometimes they’re in a night formula too as well. It’s funny because by my bed, I have a nervine and an adaptogen. One is for morning and one is for the evening and I was taking it backwards and I didn’t realize it. They still helped me. Herbs are amazing at adapting and helping the body get what it needs. I love Ashwagandha.

I had never heard of Ashwagandha before but my wife, Orion, took Ashwagandha regularly a year ago and she got a lot of benefits out of it. What is it about ashwagandha that’s so great?

It’s interesting because it’s considered a male herb. It’s considered more for men than women but that’s okay. I learned from Native American healers because I learned the plant spirit medicine, the spiritual side of it. There are maybe thirteen to fifteen adaptogens that they use. What’s the art of finding the ones that are best for your body? I love to custom blend for each person. They ask the plant. When I was in school, I had certain teachers that are very intellectual and they would say, “This is the book of knowledge, this is what you get for this. It’s like a cookbook.” Whereas the Native Americans would go, “Stephan needs an adaptogen.” They go to the herbal class and they go, “Who wants to help?” and they let the plants tell them. You find this resonance that this plant matches you better.

They’re people, they’re like personalities and then the formula is a little more magical. I don’t like talking about the plants’ chemical constituents because that’s such a masculine intellectual like breaking the plant down into pieces instead of feeling it. It’s mainly because it’s called an adaptogen. Adaptogens help the body deal with stress and mainly help you with endurance. If you have a lifestyle that does it quick, you’re always going to have the next challenge, the next trip, the next project, you want to be taking adaptogens even if there’s nothing wrong with you. Even if you sleep great, even if you have good energy because it will prevent burnout and it helps the adrenal glands deal with stress and avoid getting exhausted.

I do want to get back to the rest of the eight tools for insomnia but I got to ask you about the Native American healer first. I’m curious how did this come about? Did you start hanging out in sweat lodges? Tell me more about this Native American healing foray that you went down and are you still doing it?

I went to a naturopathic school in the year 2000 and I started off at the Southwest School in Tempe, Arizona. I ended up transferring to Portland. In the beginning of the first two years at that time, the school had a relationship with the Native American tribes and it was amazing. Our first day of school, we did a water ritual. We were in a circle and we went around with water. We said a prayer in our native tongue because we had people from around the world. We poured it into a vessel and the vessel had water from every class before us that had started from the first day the school opened. All our aspirations for we wanted to heal the world, we wanted to help people, what is in our heart. That was how I started my first day in school. Then the Native American tribe came in and did a pipe ceremony and they dedicated a pipe to the school. The auditorium was filled. They were smudging us with sage.

The next day in school, I walked out and I was late. I walked out into the backyard and there was a guy laying on the ground. There was a medicine man sitting there with a straw and he was sucking this energy of his tumor out and spitting into the Earth. I was like, “This is so cool.” It was a part of the school. One of my favorite teachers, a beautiful little dancing girl. She’s half-breed. She’s part American, part English or Anglo and then Lakota. The first month I was in school, I sat in her lecture and it completely transformed my life, especially about being a woman, my menstrual cycle and my self-esteem. Just working with a medicine woman is powerful and amazing. I don’t think that exists anymore as part of the school curriculum. A lot of the feminine intuitive ceremonial out there that some people think has been lost in the school. For me, I wasn’t sure I took the right choice by joining naturopathic school because my family wanted me to be an MD.

My aunt’s best friend became a famous doctor. One of the first, she was a pioneer, she was a legend. She was an MD who went into holistic medicine and she wrote a book that became a New York Times bestseller. Before Dr. Oz and all the doctors had books, she was one of the first. Doris Rapp was her name and she wrote a book called Is This Your Child? She was ostracized by the medical community but she decided to focus on teaching laypeople. Her work was helping hyperactive kids heal naturally without Ritalin and drugs. We’ve got a whole epidemic of young generation of kids that are high-spirited or attention deficit and they are being medicated and sedated with drugs. There are millions of moms not just in the US but around the world, they don’t want their kids on medications. It’s traumatic for them to be told that their child has to be on medication because their behavior can’t be controlled.

After seeing holistic, I didn’t want to become an MD. When I went to school at first, I was about chemist. I had jobs that are, “I’m respectable. I don’t know if this is for me.” I went to a lecture and Bill Mitchell is one of the most amazing herbal teachers. He got on the stage and his powerful presence bellowed at us. He was like, “Take herbs even if you’re not sick, they want to be with you.” The whole next lecture was about talking to plants and I was like, “I’m in.” The bottom line is I get better results. Especially, essential oils are my most powerful tool and when I open a book and said, “What should I give you for eczema or for insomnia?” I use their formulas and the results were like, “Eh.” When I do it spiritually, when I ask the plants, when I prescribe in an intuitive way. I call it balanced brain prescribing. I study the book. I study the biochemical constituents, I know the herbs but I use my emotions and my intuition to prescribe and it’s balanced and I get way better results with that. I did lots of sweat lodges, medicine wheel, and things like that. I do incorporate it still. It depends on the clientele. I get called in so many different situations.

If I had my way, I would be in a retreat sending with all kinds of ceremonial tools but I get called to go into a conservative situation like corporations. They were starting at square one here and people are not as open. It depends on where I’m working is by using it now but I do individual ceremonies especially for women who want to get pregnant. We do womb cleansing ceremonies. That’s amazing. I have women who were told they were infertile. We did a ceremony and then they could get pregnant. The thing I love about ceremonies, most of the times I’m doing usually three-month protocol to transform your body if you have any issues or goals, it takes three months. Ceremonies are amazing in that it’s transformational. You were this way before, we did the ceremony and you’re different. Your cells are different, your psychology, your spirit and you’re in a different place.

I’ve seen the first healing. The lady came in for a week long. I don’t use the word Shamanics, that’s not what I do. That’s a whole other ball of wax but she came in to work with the Native American healer. They added me to the team and she was completely healed that week. They thought she was dying and that blew me away. I learned Reiki initially. That was the other thing in school that is so cool. Almost 300 of us learned Reiki and we used to practice every week. The first month I was doing Reiki, an angel appeared and told me, “Here’s why they’re sick. Tell them they are not dying and here’s what they need to do,” and they were immediately healed. Then I was like, “Whoa.” I’m open-minded. I’m out there but there have been a lot of jobs where I hide it because it’s not cool to share all that.

I can relate. I’ve gone through so many transformational things including what you were describing as a ceremony where biochemically you’re a different person now. Something has shifted inside of your physiology just from a ceremony. I was in India at Oneness University and the monks there described how the awakening is a permanent biological change to your brain. Once you are awakened, not on an awakened state but like what they call awakening, once you have gone through that it’s an irreversible process and they proclaim me as being awakened.

There are different stages of awakening so I still have plenty of ways to go, but I feel different and I don’t tell everybody. I do tell a lot more people than let’s say my ten-year prior version of me would have kept this very much on the DL. They would be very conservative and not wanting to seem too woo-woo or whatever. I’m getting people on this podcast talking about Oneness. I had a Oneness monk who was there in India at Oneness University doing the Deeksha blessings on us and he’s been on my show. I’ve had people who are into Reiki and other kinds of energy healing. I’ve had Donny Epstein on who’s one of the amazing top healers.

I’ve done that chiropractic for five years with Sue Brown and all that.

I’m curious to hear more about the fertility thing. What is a womb cleansing ceremony? Can you share some results without getting into too many details that would violate client confidentiality? I would love to hear more.

The first case I worked on was in school. I went to see a lawyer. When I grew up, there was a war on medicine. There were doctors who hate holistic and they attack us unjustly and I was aware of this because of growing up with the famous doctor. For some reason, I didn’t have a personal problem but I thought I need to have a good lawyer to help me set up more of my corporation, my practice and my future. He was offering to work with students and to help them. I scheduled a meeting and he picked up and got curious about all this holistic stuff and who I worked with. He said, “My daughter has endometriosis and she is not able to get pregnant. Would you work with her?” I said, “Okay.” She was on a bad diet and was overweight. Ladies, they like macaroni and cheese, chips, popcorn and candy every day. This is a bad situation. Endometriosis is a very difficult condition and it’s very difficult to treat. I didn’t take on many cases because a lot of them don’t respond.

I have a dear friend with it and she hasn’t been able to have a baby. I said, “I’ll try. I’ll see you twice a week for three months to do a cleanse.” That’s where true naturopaths should start. Any problem in the body is needing of a cleanse physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You can be sure we’re all carrying toxins. We all have negative thoughts and the spirit is a whole other realm. I was open when I was in school and I would hear about ceremonies, read about them, learn about them and then go and try them. I coached a lot of MDs who want to get into this and they’re so scared to try even flower essence. I was like, “Let’s do and try this ceremony.” This ceremony, actually I learned from an herbalist from the Amazon. The womb cleanse, you get a chair that has little holes in it. I use an outdoor chair. Sometimes they make one for it. I only did it once for her and she was able to get pregnant. With endometriosis, she was heading to the point where she was not going to be able to have a child. Also having blocked fallopian tubes, which to me is from congestion from eating a lot of cheese and dairy products. That’s the number one thing, if you get off that, it will open up those tubes. It was hard to get her on a diet.

The ceremony is you pick herbs and you do it in a conscious way. My teachers used to say, “You’ve got to ask the plant permission and you’ve got to tell them what you want it to do in your body.” Most medicine woman would never get plants that they didn’t grow because they have grown from seed and it has their energy, their love, their care into it. It’s like the difference between making homemade chocolate chip cookies and going and buying some Chips Ahoy. You’re going to feel that difference in them. When they met us and said, “You’re using medicine somebody else grew.” We made the plants in bottles in school in the laboratory, in the medicinary. They’re sitting there in tinctured bottles and we had to learn 200 herbs and the Native Americans said it’s better that you learn five and know them like the back of your hands.

I went on herb walks and bought the plants. I would study a plant a week and we would do everything with it. We would bathe in it, eat it, cook with it, meditate with it and do ceremonies with it to get to know the spirit of the plant. We pick consciously. If you didn’t grow them, we would bless them and thank them and then tell them what we wanted them to do. For her, I’m trying to remember which plants we used. What I love about herbalism is that rigid herbalists will say, “This is the plant you have to use for that.” Sometimes you can use almost any plant. I use roses, marigolds and some that are specifically for the female reproductive tract. I can’t remember because that was years ago.

Anyway, I didn’t have anything official. I got an outdoor chair that was steel with little holes in it. I put a towel so her legs wouldn’t be hitting the steel but basically the woman’s, I call it yoni, I don’t want to say vagina. It sounds too clinical. She has no underwear and no clothes on. She sits on this chair and we put underneath her a pot of boiling herbs. The steam from it goes up into the vagina and it cleanses the female reproductive tract. It originally started for post birth. After women gave birth, they need to expel the placenta and any other fluids, liquids, pieces that need to come out. It was done originally for that but not just physical but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, to cleanse from the experience of birth. It can be used for any problem like fibroids, cysts, tumors, any problem in the reproductive tract or trauma. I used it a lot of women who have been raped, who have been molested and who have a history of sexual abuse. We do that to cleanse that energy. I did a lot of ceremonies on myself too as well.

Even when I would lead women’s circles, every single woman had an experience where she has been touched in a dishonoring way. Whether it was a rough physical exam from a gynecologist or dry up and teenagers like awkwardly trying to learn how to have sex and they’re too rough. Whatever it is, the female reproductive tract, it can heal this. She sits in this chair. Consciously I had her mix the plants with me. We mix them up and prepare them, put them in a pot of boiling water. You put a sheet over your body and then a wool blanket while you sit there while the steam is going in there. Then I got a rattle and I sang and I called in the grandmothers, the ancestors, the nature spirits, and the beings in the invisible realm that wanted to assist with the ceremony, which you don’t have to do but it adds to the power of it.

It was cool because as I was sitting there, I saw in my third eye, my mind’s eye this little Mayan grandmother. She was four-feet tall, she was beautiful like a shaman and her hair was in a tight bun and she had this wrinkly face. If you saw the picture, you’d be like, “Machu Picchu like the Andes. It looked like a photograph.” She came and smiled at me and took a wooden ladle and poured some water over her head smiling. It was like an anointing and I knew right then and there that it was going to be effective. Sometimes at these ceremonies, the ancestors of the spirits come. They’re like too forgone or the person has to face their karmic situation and they’re not going to be able to overcome this condition. Not everything can be healed. I believe almost anything can be healed but there are very few instances where people whatever is the background of it can be transformed. She was not a conscious person, she was just like me and was open-minded. We were doing exercise and diet mostly but I just said, “Let’s try this,” and she has three kids. I love her and she still eats like that. I want to say like crap but those are hard habits to change. She’s still overweight. She still has acne. She still eats like crap. She’s got those three little babies to love.

To me, of everything we did, when I do a three-month program on someone, I have to get everything I got, all the tools and that to me was the most potent. This has that mysterious element of we don’t know what happened. If you get intellectual with it and be like, “Her progesterone levels and her hormone balance,” but what really did it, I don’t know. I didn’t even ask her like, “What did you feel or how were you different?” I didn’t say anything but yet the babies came. The most powerful case, not a reproductive stuff but healing terminal illness was before that and that’s my favorite story. Our mind cannot comprehend what happened because it’s happening in the spiritual realm, which sometimes are just unexplainable.

Could you share that one story about the terminal illness?

A famous shaman or a medicine man was working in our school and this woman came in. I thought this is intense. She paid $10,000 to a week of retreat to see him and he was super busy. He called in other people to help as a team like he’d spent two to four hours there. She wanted someone to work with her diet and do this. They hired me to come and do some exercise and feminity because I belly dance and they were like, “Help her be more feminine.” She hated me and hated that. This woman, she’d look like she was lesbian and I was like, “She’s not interested in belly dancing with me. What am I going to do?” I said, “Let’s Reiki.” She was like, “Okay.” She laid down and she had a condition called Sarcoidosis, which all her lymph glands in her chest if you massaged her chest felt crunchy like hardened. I’ve never felt anything like it before. It turns out she was sprayed with pesticides. She lived in flat farmland and she was sprayed with pesticides. That was the physical level and doctors don’t know how to treat lymph. They don’t know anything about it. They don’t know how to cure it.

She had severe lymph congestion and they didn’t know how to treat it and she was sick and thought she was going to die. I started doing Reiki. I closed my eyes and I saw this angel. She was in beautiful green robes and brunette. She said, “First of all, tell her that she’s not dying.” Then she spoke to me in pictures and she showed this picture, if you took a beautiful ribbon that was coiled like that ribbon candy pink and magenta and orange and it was wrapped in it. She put it in my heart and she showed me when I do stuff that I love like singing and some emotion and dancing, that this ribbon starts coming out of your heart. It’s like light and it’s beautiful colors and it starts spreading out into the atmosphere. It’s nourishing the plants and the trees. It was this beautiful image and she said, “Being happy matters.”

When you do stuff you love, all of the nature responds and you feed nature and it feeds you back. There’s supposed to be this reciprocal figurate flow in nature. This woman’s problem was she lived in the mountains and she loved it. She hiked and she had a happy life but her family got sick and she moved to this horrible area she didn’t like that was flatlands, no nature, no hiking. She stayed too long out of obligation. That’s all that angel had said. She showed me this picture like it matters being happy. I got the download of like, “She’s living in an area she hates out of obligation. She’s done with her duty and she doesn’t need to be there any longer.” I got up and back then I was a newbie and very unabashed and I said, “An angel appeared and she told me you hate living where you are and you’re supposed to be in the mountains and you’d love it there.” That woman barely said a word to me. She got up. She got on the phone, called her partner and she was like, “We’re moving.”

A month later she texted me a photo of her happy, hiking in the mountains and life is good. I was like that was the grim, “You’re going to die and you have an unexplained condition. We don’t know how to treat it too.” I used to share like, “I’m clairvoyant. I could see angels and I have a session.” I was unabashed and I was super busy. Then I graduated and got a job where I had to pay the bills and they were like, “No way you could share any of that stuff or you’ll be fired.” One of my favorite people is Larry Dossey. I went to a conference by him when I was in school. That changed my life too. He’s amazing. He was fired from a hospital as president for praying with patients. Then he became the champion of it, even doing studies on prayer and healing. After I went to his conference when I was in the clinic I would be like, “Do you want to pray before we start?” People are like, “Yes.” I learn to pray with people of different languages.

I felt like people hate going to the doctor. They’re terrified, they’re stressed and that was such a nice way to open by saying, “Let’s pray and ask that we solve this.” The doctors’ problem is they’re very removed from their patients. They’re behind a desk and they’re wearing a lab coat or scrubs. I like to sit with people, hold their hand and I’m like, “Let’s pray. Let’s ask the ancestors, let’s ask whatever your beliefs are.” We’re not going to solve this with the human mind. We should all be like beginner mind and take away all your training. Throw it out the window and be an open slate and you will be guided from a place that you don’t understand. To me, is where I want to be.

I think it’s pretty much the opposite of most people in the medical establishment especially doctors. They worked so hard to get their MD. They’re full of arrogance. They have the opposite of beginner’s mind.

All people don’t take me seriously because they think all this is woo-woo and they don’t take me seriously, but you can’t dispute results though.

If you hadn’t gone out on a limb and done those things of praying and ceremonies and things like that, you’ve probably wouldn’t have gotten the result and saved people’s lives and help them get pregnant when all hope was practically gone. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this video that went viral on YouTube and Facebook. It was about this Aboriginal group. These individuals who are healers in the Aboriginal group in some part of Australia in the outback. This hospital, which is an allopathic regular hospital, decided to employ these medicine men and women healers from the tribes. They do their thing, their magic. They’d stand over a patient, put their hands on the person and start saying whatever and praying and doing their thing and this gets results. It’s amazing. People will come from all over Australia to get treated at this particular hospital in the middle of nowhere. There’s a team of ten healers from Aboriginal tribes.

People need this because our problems are getting more complex and more severe. Our food, water, and the air is being poisoned at levels that we never imagined. It’s destroying our health and the environment and the challenges we face in our bodies is intense.

It’s like an assault. It’s not just certain toxins. It’s everything from all of the food we eat, to the air that we breathe and the water we drink. We should be doing something more holistic than simply taking a particular supplement or whatever that’s insufficient. I take Restore, which is for dealing with the glyphosate, the Roundup that’s everywhere. It’s in 60% of rainfall and stuff. It’s evil what Monsanto has done to humanity. That’s one particular solution. What about the air that we breathe in that’s full of toxins and stuff? You can’t just make solutions to all this stuff.

It’s funny that we went to talk about Myers Cocktails and we are segueing to spirituality. We met through Amma, the Indian guru and I don’t tell many people that because they think that you’re in a cult and you’re going to give all your money away. That’s how we met, through the Hugging Saint.

She’s amazing. Anybody who has the opportunity to go get a hug from Amma, you must. I have gotten two from her, so has Orion, my wife. It’s been life-changing and it’s just a hug but it’s not just a hug. You’re getting infused with some spiritual magic of some sort. I got my mantra from Amma. From my understanding of the Indian Hindu spiritual belief system, when somebody gives you a mantra, they are tied to you and to your karma. Let’s say you are not a good person and you don’t escape the circle of life, the birth, death, rebirth, etc. When you reach enlightenment, you escape that cycle. She can never get to that place of enlightenment and escape the cycle while any of her followers that she’s given mantras to are still in that less enlightened place. She has essentially given up her chances for escaping the cycle because she’s given out millions of mantras to devotees.

She takes on people’s burden and a lot of healers do that. When I work with someone, we take on a piece of their burden. I don’t want to use the word karma because I have a lot of Christian patients. We don’t want a dispute reincarnation, but there’s a burden we all carry and it can be heavy and with an illness, it’s heavy. When you work with someone who has spiritual power and compassion, they take a portion of that burden from you. They’re giving of themselves a portion of their mastery to help accelerate your path. It’s like the difference between if we’re going to New York, between taking a Greyhound bus or a jumbo jet. It’s just faster. Everybody that came to me with a life-threatening illness that I brought to her is alive. It’s amazing.

The thing is the illness comes from misaligned spirit and wrong thoughts, then they filter through our emotions and then it goes into the physical body. Yet with healing, everyone starts with the physical body. After people have gotten into dead ends, then they start looking at, “I should have some mastery over my mind and my emotions.” I met an Indian person who laughs at American said, “You have the monkey mind. You guys have no mastery of your thoughts because you don’t meditate.” I was like, “I’m taking that on as a challenge. I’m not going to be the monkey mind. I want to learn how to have a sharp focus mind. I want to learn how to meditate.” That started my search and exploration into Indian spirituality because a lot of American spiritual seekers, it’s not fun to have an agitated mind and body.

It leads to insomnia and stress and all that.

I remembered that I was talking about insomnia. I love talking about esoteric things but I want to give people concrete tools too. By my bed, I have magnesium, nervine, combination herbal with lavender, California poppies, skullcap and Lemon Balm. If you go out to a health store and say, “Give me your sleep herbs in a liquid.” I take 60 drops, which are two full droppers before bed. Then I love this product called De-Stress by Biotics. It’s a tablet and it’s small. I take two of them and that is from milk. I think the research was being done to look at why is the cup of warm milk before bed a good home remedy? They found that there’s a protein in there that is like Xanax, it relaxes the body. I don’t feel any drowsiness from it. I love to give that one. It’s gentle, it helps you sleep deeper. For some people, it solves their sleep problems but some people it’s just subtle but it’s one in my toolkit.

If that doesn’t work for more severe insomnia, Biotics has a product called PheniTropic and that is super potent. To me, it’s the most potent thing that’s a natural thing next before sleep medicines and I’ll have people use that. That can make people drowsy but that one is amazing. The other thing I use is CBD oil. I love CBD oil. That’s so popular now and I was sceptic at first but I find it’s a muscle relaxant. It’s amazing. I found a lot of people are selling it. Some people get results. I think it’s the form that they use. The company, the brand, there are certain quality differences but also using a strong enough dose, not being afraid. People are scared of herbs and it’s hard to overdose on herbs. You would probably vomit. The stuff that’s sold over the counter, they are what’s called toxic botanicals, which only herbalist doctors can prescribe. I use it sometimes in drop doses but most of the time you’re not going to poison your liver if you have a good product and even if you take a lot of amounts.

I tell people too and I would go into somebody’s house and they’re getting up to six drops where I said, “Hold on.” They’re like, “I need all the help I can get.” I’m like, “Slow down.” Even still, they didn’t feel any harmful effects. You probably will throw up before you get any serious problem if you took too much of an herb. People will take one capsule. Capsules compared to liquids, you probably have to take twenty capsules equal what you can take with liquids. A lot of people don’t know that when they say they’ve gone and tried sleep products. You also have Theanine and there are products like that. I don’t use that. That’s not one of my favorites. I haven’t used it.

The most effective thing is to get a urine neurotransmitter test and see which neurotransmitters are out of balance, then you can more accurately prescribe which thing to take. It’s an individual thing. Some products rock people’s world and other people feel nothing because there are different neurotransmitters. You have two groups, you have excitatory and inhibitory. If you are inhibitory, the ones that tell you to go to sleep or are too low, you’re not going to sleep. If you are excitatory or too wound up, then you won’t sleep because you’re overcharged. There are different ones that bring nutrients and herbs that balance those out. A lot of people have low serotonin but there are other excitatory neurotransmitters. If someone has too many excitatory neurotransmitters, I want to give them higher sedative herbs. There are nervine herbs and then there are sedative herbs. If somebody has too low of inhibitory, like too low serotonin, you want to use 5-HTP and fish oils because that will bring that up. Magnesium relaxes your muscles, a nervine herb relaxes your nerves, Rescue Remedy tells your soul to relax and the De-Stress. Those are my first four.

If those don’t work, then we do a test and then I try things like CBD Oil and the PheniTropic. I have had bad insomnia from time to time and I just never get tired. I keep working and working. Pulsed magnetic field was the only thing that could help me sleep. I love what it’s called the Magnesphere treatment. You go to a place, they have one in Brentwood and one in Woodland Hills where you lay in a recliner like a zero-gravity chair and then there’s this big contraption and you just lay there for an hour. You don’t feel anything. After I do that, I feel like I’ve meditated for a week. Then you can get a mat that you can lie on at home. I used to lay on this pulsed magnetic field and that was the only thing that put me to sleep. Then I use sound healing. I recorded for sound healing CDs with crystal singing bowls because I was a singer before I went to school. I sing to my patients while they’re getting their drip and I sing people to sleep.

Some patients that I had, that was the only hour of 24 that they were calm with the bowls. I was like, “I’ve got to record this so they can listen to it when I’m not there.” I’ll use that and binaural beats like different sound healing. Sound healing is great because when you’ve exhausted all supplement type of stuff, it can quiet the mind. I have a sleep aromatherapy spray. That has a supernatural power. I’m amazed with that. We call it the Archangel Michael protection. It brings spiritual protection. There was a group of kids meditating and I sprayed on everyone. There was a girl who came up to me two weeks later and she was like, “I just want you to know I’ve had nightmares every night for the past ten years and ever since you’ve sprayed me with those oils, I don’t have them anymore.” I was like, “How does that work?” I had no idea what I was doing with it or I didn’t expect anything. I’ve had people since then that are on Trazodone and Ambien and all these medications and they’re like, “I was able to get off them with this spray.” I’m like, “A spray?” I was expecting it would take a lot more.

That’s my eight things. The three top nervine essential oils are lavender, chamomile and Melissa. I use it in that progressive order because Melissa’s super expensive and chamomile gets pricey, so I start with lavender. We had a baby that was screaming, crying and driving the parents crazy. I took a piece of yarn and put a drop of lavender and tied it above the crib and it stopped her screaming. That’s amazing. Aromatherapy has spiritual power. Plants themselves, if you honor the Earth and the plants are charged with spiritual energy, you thank the plant, you ask it for help and you have that love for the plant. It has more potent healing power with it and essential oils have the most potent. That’s one of my favorite tools. I tell people, “Get some lavender or chamomile and put it on your sheets or diffuse them and use them before you go to bed.” Even a lavender bath is so simple but it can help relax the body.

There’s so much in this that we could unpack if we had an extra hour. We could talk about diffusers, we could talk about binaural beats and sound healing, and the pulsed magnetic fields. I’ve tried some of this stuff, pulsed magnetic fields. I go to the Bulletproof Biohacking conference every year. There’s one of the vendors in the exhibit hall that have that equipment and then you can try getting the magnetic stimulation and stuff. I also did 40 Years of Zen, which is a five-day program. The idea is you condense what would take 40 years of meditation on a mountaintop as a Zen monk into a five-day program because of the neurofeedback. All the intensive work that you do, they have these augmented reset process. You have a whole episode dedicated to the 40 Years of Zen program. The CTO of 40 Years of Zen, Chris Keane was on the podcast.

Sleep is important. I did a whole one-hour video DVD you could download from my website that I go into detail on all these things.

I enjoyed this episode and this interview. Thank you so much, Matea, for sharing your wisdom and being so vulnerable and sharing everything with us. If somebody wanted to work with you, they wanted to buy some of your products. If they wanted to get on the waiting list to get IV, vitamin cocktails, where should we send them to?

My website is www.DrMatea.com and I have a new site going up called Elite Performance Strategies just focus on athletes and stress too. That’s coming up and I’m going to be live streaming group coaching since from time-to-time I’m not able to see people one-on-one. I’m going to be live streaming and flip up on the camera and you can ask me anything and I can coach people one-on-one. I’ll teach something concrete. My phone number is (310) 593-4527. Thank you so much for asking me. This is my very first podcast and it was so much fun. I love to share because there are so many great tools that can help people that they are not aware of.

If you open your mind and your heart, your soul to things that are not typical allopathic traditional medicine approach, there’s a whole new realm available to you of healing and of elevating yourself to new levels and performance, consciousness, spirituality, and the impact that you can have in the world and to others. Thank you for going off on all these different tangents about stuff that wasn’t the typical Myers Cocktails and vitamins approach.

Thank you for hosting this and sharing for everyone. I know it takes a lot of energy and discipline to be consistent with this. Thank you for what you’re doing to share all the good things you’ve learned. I know you’re inspiring many people.

Thank you. It is a joy and I feel like it’s part of my mission. It doesn’t feel like work. Thank you so much, Matea. Thank you to our audience. It’s time to take some action. There are many things that you could apply. Don’t get overwhelmed with it, instead take a few things that you’ve learned from this episode and apply them in your life. If it’s a diffuser and some aromatherapy, getting some essential oils. If it’s to take the urine neurotransmitter test, to buy Matea’s sleep aromatherapy spray, sound healing, binaural beats app on your phone. Whatever it is, take some action and we’ve made it easy for you by taking some of the action-oriented items from this episode and creating a checklist of action items.

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