Heal with Grace

Grace Secker
  • 5.0 (37)
  • Mental Health
  • Updated Weekly

Heal With Grace is a podcast that invites listeners into the world of holistic healing. Hosted by Grace Secker, a trained holistic psychotherapist, yoga therapist, and nervous system coach, each episode delves into the interconnected realms of mental, physical, and spiritual health. The podcast offers a unique blend of personal stories, professional insights, and practical tools for healing.

  1. 13h ago

    145. How To Heal Food Sensitivities

    If you've been cutting out food after food trying to heal your food sensitivities, and your safe list keeps getting shorter, this episode is for you. I'm recording from Austin, the city where I was once down to 10 to 15 foods for a year and a half. I remember sitting at the food tasting for my own wedding and not being able to eat any of it. Just sitting there watching. So when I say I get it, I really get it. Here's what I want you to hear. Your reactions are real. The bloating, the pain, the headaches after you eat, none of that is in your head. But reacting to food is not the root cause of your symptoms. When your brain learns that bread or dairy or tomatoes are dangerous, it does its job and protects you. It sends a symptom. And every time you cut out another food, the fear gets a little louder. I also share something I don't talk about much. My eating disorder actually started with a restrictive anti-inflammatory paleo diet from a practitioner I trusted. I was just trying to help my body. We talk about why so many people with chronic symptoms end up in the same food-fear loop, and the patterns I see over and over: perfectionism, self-criticism, control. And why flexibility is one of the best things you can give yourself. Then I walk you through what actually helped me feel safe with food again. Telling my brain before and after every meal that food is safe. Visualizing my body digesting it well, whether it was a Reese's peanut butter cup or chicken broth. Looking honestly at the stress in my life. It wasn't overnight. It was a practice, every single day. If you're a therapist, coach, or health practitioner, stick around. I share the one language shift I want you to make with your clients starting today. And if you have a true allergy like celiac or a nut allergy, this isn't about that. This is about the sensitivities and intolerances that showed up later in life and built up over time. Resources mentioned: Mind Body Healing Method, my small group nervous system program How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  2. Sep 29

    144. What I've Learned About Treating Neuroplastic Symptoms

    Most people never think to ask whether their symptoms have a nervous system root cause. They get the gut issues, the migraines, the fatigue, the pain, and they go looking for the structural answer. More testing. More protocols. More specialists. In this episode Grace goes back to her early days of switching her niche from eating disorders to chronic pain and illness, and shares the things she got wrong before she got solid. The first one is safety. She used to move faster than her clients' nervous systems were ready for. Sending the podcast, sending the book, trying to convince someone that the thing they had been fighting for twenty years was actually a danger response. What she learned is that belief is not the entry point. Safety is. You do not need someone to agree with you on day one. You need them to feel safe enough to get curious. The second one is the both/and. She spent a long time being wobbly about structural findings. The bulged disc. The SIBO. The autoimmune diagnosis. The cervical spine finding. She would back off and refer out, which left people stranded. Now she says it plainly. Structural things are real. They are also often not the reason the symptoms keep persisting. Holding both at once without flattening either one is a clinical skill, not a belief system, and it is learnable. She also gets into the nuance she did not used to assess for, including neurodivergence, and why a framework that makes you less curious about the person in front of you is being used wrong. Then there is the one that took the longest. You do not have to be certain to do this work. Not as a client, not as a practitioner. The 3am searching on WebMD and in the AI chats feels productive, but it is the nervous system demanding certainty before it is willing to stand down. Bodies do not hand you certainty. They hand you information. The work is building enough safety to keep moving while it is still unclear. Resources mentioned: Nervous System Screener questionnaire Mind-Body Integration Method Practitioner Training, first cohort starts October 2026. Early bird pricing ends September 17, doors close October 2 How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  3. Sep 22

    143. How to Get Unstuck in Your Healing with Doc Tovah

    If you feel stuck in chronic pain recovery, this one is for you. Not the beginning part where you are figuring out what neuroplastic symptoms even are. The part where you have done the work, read the books, hired the coaches, and something still has not moved. Doc Tovah has been a chiropractor for 41 years and has hosted the TMS Roundtable for seven, with over 500 broadcasts. She is 69. Her mother had MS starting when Doc Tovah was eleven, she grew up in a house she describes as chaotic, and she was diagnosed with Crohn's along the way. She talks about that diagnosis almost in passing, which is the whole point. She names the pattern she sees in people who stay stuck, and it is not effort. It is disconnection. People who cannot tell you what they feel. People who say "I don't know" so often that it becomes a freeze response. People who feel okay around others and fall apart the second they are alone with themselves. That gap is the work. We also get into the part almost nobody says out loud, which is that a victim stance can be doing a job for you. It protected me from being seen and rejected for years, and I did not know it was happening. Doc Tovah has been there too and she says it plainly. You are the problem and you are the solution, and that is the good news. Then she gives the practice. Not a technique to add to your list. A relationship. Coffee with your fear. Going to sleep with your loneliness. Sitting with the feeling instead of building a story around it. She says fear can paralyze you or it can be fuel, and the difference is not how brave you are, it is whether you stop fighting reality long enough to be with it. One more thing she said that I keep thinking about. Pain is not punishing you. It is protecting you. And most people who feel stuck are not far away from healing. They are standing right at the door. Connect with Doc Tovah - TMS Roundtable, Doc Tovah's YouTube channel - Doc Tovah website  How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  4. Sep 15

    142. The Training That Catapulted My Own Healing

    If you have been circling the idea of mind-body practitioner training, this one is for you. Not the version where you collect a certificate. The version where the training changes you while you are learning it. Before I took my first pain reprocessing therapy training, I had already done a lot of my own work. I had let go of most of the chronic pain. The food intolerances, the histamine reactions, the fatigue, all of it had come way down. And I had plateaued. Better, not free. There was still this low hum of managing my body instead of trusting it. Then I went into the training and applied every single thing to myself. Light bulbs, over and over. That is the part nobody warns you about. When you learn how to guide someone else's nervous system, you are also signing up for the next chapter of your own. I also say the thing I wish somebody had said to me five years ago. You do not have to be fully healed to help other people heal. I talk about the crash that had me lying on the couch wondering if everything I had learned was a fraud. The antidepressants I quit in college because I had decided, all on my own, that a therapist could not be on them. The imposter syndrome that has followed me my whole career. And the day my body ran an actual fever right before a three-day professional retreat, because walking into a room full of other clinicians felt that unsafe to my system. I share what I did instead of staying in bed. It is the clearest example I have of teaching your body that you can be uncomfortable and still be safe. If you have been quietly wondering whether you are meant to share this work with other people, the part about curiosity being the only real prerequisite is for you. Resources mentioned Mind Body Integration Training, my six-week live practitioner training. Founding cohort is application-based. Early bird pricing through September 17th; doors close October 2nd, first live session October 22nd. Bring a colleague, and you each get $100 off. https://programs.healwithgrace.co/mbimt How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  5. Sep 8

    141. How to Prevent a Nervous System Flare While Traveling

    I just got back from three weeks in Namibia, and regulating my nervous system while traveling got tested every single day of that trip. I'm not going to pretend it was smooth. We changed hotels more nights than not, lost service we'd already paid for, and a few days in, I felt the same warning signs that used to send me into a flare that lasted weeks. This time it lasted three days. The difference wasn't that nothing went wrong. Things went wrong constantly. The difference was what I did next. I'd already padded my nervous system before I left, so when a flare showed up in the middle of nowhere with no doctor for hours, I had support lined up instead of panic. I got what I needed physically, then I went hard on the mind-body tools I actually teach: breath, visualization, journaling on what the flare might be asking for. It didn't erase the fear in the moment, but it kept the fear from running the show. I'm also getting honest about the cold I came home with, and why I'm done calling every post-travel symptom "just jet lag" without asking what it's actually pointing to. In the past, coming home from a big trip meant a full week of feeling like I was falling apart. This time it didn't, and I want to walk you through why. If you've ever noticed your body has a pattern around travel, or around any kind of stress, this episode walks through how I'm learning to read that pattern instead of just riding it out. Healing was never about never getting activated again. It's about widening how much activation you can hold before it takes you down. That's the real lesson this trip handed me, and it's what I'm handing you today. Resources mentioned: Episode 137. What I'm Doing to Prep My Nervous System for Travel How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  6. Sep 1

    140. 5 Things I See People Do Who Recover

    If you're trying to figure out how to recover from chronic pain and illness and you keep hitting the same wall, this is the episode I want you to save and come back to. Because here's what happens when you're stuck. Your frontal lobe (the logical, decision-making part of you) goes offline in a stress response. So you forget everything you've learned. I've been there. I was there a couple of years ago after my mold crash, years into being recovered, and I forgot half the skills I had. That's not failure. That's what a stressed nervous system does. So save this one. Come back to it when the flare hits and your brain goes one-track. I'm walking through the five things I consistently see in people who go from stuck to recovered, and they're the same things that got me there. It starts with how you describe yourself (there's a real difference between "I'm someone with chronic fatigue" and "I'm a healing body," and it's not positive thinking; it's what your subconscious is running on). Then we get into stopping the 3am searching and the WebMD spiral, which feels productive but keeps your nervous system in threat mode. We also talk about going into your emotions without being afraid of them, how to change your response when a flare shows up instead of freaking out and assuming you're back at square one, and the big one: living your life WHILE you still have symptoms. Because living first, carefully and gently, is what teaches the body it's safe. Waiting until you feel better keeps the alarm on. None of this is willpower. It's all retraining. And it's completely learnable. Resources mentioned: Free neuroplastic symptom screener (2-minute quiz) JournalSpeak by Nicole Sachs How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  7. Aug 25

    139. What I Wish Every Therapist or Coach Knew About the Nervous System

    This one's for the therapists, coaches, and practitioners. (And honestly, if you're a listener who's ever sat across from a provider who didn't know how to help you stay. This episode is why I made it.) Here's the gap I want to name. Most of us were trained beautifully in one half of this work. We learned to hold space, build the therapeutic relationship, sit with hard feelings, work with trauma histories. What we were never taught is that the nervous system is actively generating physical symptoms in a huge portion of our caseloads. Some physicians in this space estimate close to 40% of people walking through a primary care door have symptoms driven this way. Those are the same people landing on our couches, in our rooms, on our Zoom calls. And a lot of us were never taught to even assess for it. I know I wasn't. So in this episode I'm walking through the difference between regulating a nervous system and rewiring it, and why almost all of us were only trained for one. Regulation is state management. It's the longer exhale, the feet on the floor, the co-regulation. It's foundational and it matters enormously (a nervous system that never gets to feel safe cannot do deeper work). BUT if regulation is all we do, we're managing the danger alarm instead of updating it. I also get into how the brain learns a symptom in the first place, what neuroplastic symptoms actually are, why "your pain is real AND the signal is coming from the brain" is the most important thing you can say to a client, and what changes on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon when you finally have a map for the client whose GI tests keep coming back normal. And I'll tell you what this did for me: it didn't just change my clients' outcomes, it changed how it feels to do the work. I stopped doubting whether I could help. Resources mentioned: Free neuroplastic symptom assessment tool Free practitioner masterclass, Tuesday, September 8 MindBody Integration Method practitioner training, launching this fall How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

  8. Aug 18

    138. Healing Chronic Pain That Hasn't Budged in Years with Dr. David Schechter

    If you've been living with chronic pain that won't go away -> the kind that hasn't budged in years, no matter how many doctors, scans, or treatments you've thrown at it -> this conversation is going to give you something most appointments never have: a reason it makes sense, and a real way forward. Dr. David Schechter has been treating chronic pain through a mind-body lens for decades. He trained under Dr. John Sarno himself -> the physician who started this entire field -> after walking into his office as a young medical student with knee pain that wouldn't quit. What Sarno told him that day changed the direction of his career. And what happened at that Monday night seminar might sound a lot like what you've been waiting to feel: a weight lifting. In this episode, David breaks down the difference between acute and chronic pain, and why anything past the 3-6 month mark means your nervous system is involved -> no matter what your scans show. We get into the concept every patient needs to know: the nocebo effect. Because the words a doctor says to you ("you have a horrible spine," "you'll need surgery in five years") don't just describe your body. They can shape your pain. Language, as David puts it, is the software of the brain. We also talk about what it takes to heal symptoms that have been around for years, not months -> the persistence, the doubts worth exploring, and why focusing on capacity instead of pain changes the trajectory. And he shares two stories I can't stop thinking about: patients who saw more than twenty physicians, and finally found their way to neuroplastic healing because AI pointed them somewhere no doctor had. If your pain has been dismissed, mislabeled, or just plain stuck -> this one's for you. Find Dr. David Schechter: Website Books: The MindBody Workbook Think Away Your Pain ATNS Practitioner Directory How to work with Grace: Apply to the Mind Body Integration Training Founding Practitioner CohortMind-Body Healing Method Course - Regulate your nervous system nowFree Masterclass: How to Know If Your Nervous System Is Behind Your SymptomsWork with us in private mind-body coaching Subscribe to my Substack for the deeper how-to'sConnect with Grace Connect on InstagramCheck out my website

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out of 5
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About

Heal With Grace is a podcast that invites listeners into the world of holistic healing. Hosted by Grace Secker, a trained holistic psychotherapist, yoga therapist, and nervous system coach, each episode delves into the interconnected realms of mental, physical, and spiritual health. The podcast offers a unique blend of personal stories, professional insights, and practical tools for healing.

Information

  • Creator
    Grace Secker
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    144
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Heal with Grace
  • Show Website
    Heal with Grace

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