 Hi, my name is Jackie Weirach and thank you for joining us here today on another episode of You and Your Health. We are so fortunate to have Barbara Lucasi join us today. Thank you Barbara for coming out and joining us. You have been such a delight and a wonderful addition to my life. You have helped me in time of great need for creating some wellness in my body and that was through massage and talk and direction and introductions and it's just unfolding more and more every day. So tell me about you and your beginning to work in the field of wellness and what prompted this major career switch for you. Oh yeah, huge. Huge. Yeah. Yeah, I was working as an actress in Hollywood. And yeah, all the choices that I was making, I still wasn't happy and I didn't understand this elusive happiness. What did it mean to be happy? And I was getting massage, professional massage since I was 19, but I just felt something needed to change and I didn't know what it was and so I just completely left Hollywood and but I didn't leave California. I went down to my dad's in San Diego and just enrolled in a massage school with not the intention of becoming a massage therapist but with the intention of learning about my body mind. Okay, talk more about body mind. That's a great question. I'm not an authority on it but I can explain it as I know it. So body mind meaning how, there's actually a field called psychoneuroimmunology. I wanted to get that degree but I thought it would be too long to introduce myself as a psychoneuroimmunologist. I just grabbed that. It's not like body mind. So basically it's the same thing. It's how the mind affects the body and the immune system as a psychoneuroimmunologist. Body mind same thing, how the choices that we make with our body affect our mind and how the choices we make with our mind affect our body. It's a symbiotic chicken or the egg thing, right. What comes first I don't know. Like I said, this is kind of beyond my pay grade but I can only speak with what I know. But I felt that the choices that I was making, there was some sort of correlation to whatever I was doing wasn't making me happy. I was getting temporary pleasures and temporary pains but there was no kind of consistency. And so through learning, through different exercises that we would do in the massage school, like one time they had us lie on the floor, it looked like a crime scene and they had these big sheets of paper and they had you chalk outline your body and then you had to write little snippets about your toe or your knee or your eye or whatever, your belly button and make a connection with those parts of your body. Like maybe you hated your knees, so you felt you had ugly knees, well maybe you were made fun of or whatever and then you had to have this dialogue and it sounds very new agey and whatever but it was a way, there were different exercises for you to connect with your body so you weren't disowning it and then therefore when we disconnect from parts of our body I have found and I've seen in my clients over the years that we just don't take care of it. It's a plant, it needs to be nurtured and cared for and so if somebody doesn't like their feet, whatever, you know then problems will start happening. You'll get bunions, you'll get toes starting to grow like this or then at some point you might even have to have surgery so which is kind of what happened to me. Tell me more. You know around the same time that I left acting, I never left it here, I just left the business because the business was crazy, you're shaking your head. So when I left that and then I started to go into massage then as I started to uncover things I started to realize that I had almost like a hatred for myself. It was very deeply rooted, I didn't realize how much I just didn't like myself which is strange you know and there's a thought about how each part of your body represents something, kind of a metaphor, I have a manuscript that I started writing called body as a metaphor, you know like when we say oh you know the weight of the world on the shoulders and then the person has chronic shoulder problems right or they keep saying that person's a pain in the butt and then they have hemorrhoids you know or just think of how we use those metaphors all the time right. So anyway the breasts are nurturing right and nurturing nurturing and so I had a lot of issues with nurturing giving and receiving when I was younger and then I just I didn't like my body I just didn't really care for myself and I was way out of balance. How so? When I was working in the film industry I just was I didn't do drugs and alcohol but I did alcohol and caffeine and so and not just that in and of itself doing having a glass of wine or having a coffee is not you know nothing it has to do with the amount that you're doing right and my mind was out of control and that I didn't have balance I didn't have a sense of groundedness and Eastern medicine they talk about and in Ayurveda which I guess also can be considered Eastern medicine when I when I say Eastern medicine I'm thinking of like acupuncture and Chinese medicine but India is also considered the East. They have concepts of like people have heard kafa and vata and pitta right so I would vata is very airy and they're doing lots of things they're very creative so in balance they're very creative out of balance their heads in the clouds and they're very moving to there's no ground it's just air it's like a wind how do you say tornado mm-hmm yeah then pitta is fire so when fire is out of balance it's just scorches everything in sight so that's persons that kind of out of balance they're they're very angry all the time so I'm clenching my fists before the word comes right so body mind that our bodies know before sometimes we can even articulate the words right kafa is just very lethargic and that's out of balance in balance of vata person has all these creative and great ideas but they are but they're balanced with them right then that hydroplaning all over the place right pitta has got fire they'll get things done you can cook with fire you don't have to scorch the whole field right torch the house you can cook with it you can do something constructive with it and then kafa instead of going into you know some sort of ice cream comatose you can be slow and steady that energy is necessary for so and steady so they have these ancient wisdoms with Ayurveda you can do I'm not an Ayurvedic specialist but we'll see if we can find someone who is talk about it Chinese medicine also has a similar categorical thing where they break them up into you know this is your body mind type based on your behavior in your physical body and bring it back into balance and so I learned some of this before pre-cancer a little bit I was learning like okay and then I started to discover I'm really out of balance I'm just drinking too much coffee to wake up and do things and it's almost like a self-medication without the medication right and I just felt this I was caught up in this turbine of go go go go go go go but the Sun doesn't shine in the sky 24 hours a day the moon comes out as well too it's not summertime you know 365 days a year right yeah what unless you're in LA yeah well even that you know they have June Gloom right that's true so I mean there's so there's a balance there's always something even on the equator you know or when there's the what do you call it the up in the polls yeah when you're at one of the polls okay but you still there is still some downtime though it may be small there's still something there there's still a restorative time and like this winter I loved looking at that and it's always every winter in the Northeast it's so wonderful to me because I look out and I'm like it looks like there's nothing going on and then that first crocus or something comes up and you're like look at that yeah and so that to me is a metaphor for something amazing and then can also be destructive or constructive depending how you look at it for me it looked like there was nothing going on and then couple of days before Christmas in 1999 they went not you've got mail but you've got cancer and I was like but I kind of knew that it was coming I was only 29 I kind of knew it was coming how did you know it had been let's see 1999 so I had been studying massage for two years and actively working as a therapist and I was doing a lot of meditation and so you'd think that would have brought me back into balance yeah my life had been so far out of balance that I was just starting to get righted and I liken this to something that okay everybody's got an attic or a garage or a basement so if you're throwing stuff back in there and not cleaning it for you know 20 years and then finally one day you're like I'm going to clean it and then you open it you're like oh no not today not today maybe yeah okay well let me just tackle this much and just say you know we'll keep going with the metaphor you know every year is say another you know square foot or whatever or another box and you know what happens every time you open up that box oh nostalgia or what about this or oh god or cry or vomit or whatever it is just bringing up stuff right and so that's what happened and so I didn't know if I was gonna live or die because they said you had five years I had five years to live based on the severity and the speed of it I was an aggressive breast cancer and they before they found it they wanted to turn me away they said you're 29 it's fibrous cystic don't worry about it I'm like I've been meditating I didn't tell them this but I'm like I I kind of prayed for a change I prayed for something to happen I actually literally said I don't know who or what's out there at the time I was kind of floundering for some sort of faith in something in addition to myself faith in myself I was also looking for that too I was like I don't know I feel something but I don't quite know what it is whatever it is please hook me up help me out but accelerate my growth process and get me out of here is exactly what I said and I had just had an exam and within two weeks there was something in my Cosmo or L they were doing this they just started I think the October breast cancer month campaign and my friends like oh look you gotta do this okay and I was like oh I have a lump and it happened like two weeks after I made this prayer and I just gotten an exam and fully checked because where I was working I was gonna give up my insurance and so that started a 10 year journey I was on that track for 10 years it was fun clearly you've healed it's clear that what you've healed I've healed so my friend Wendy with whom you interviewed the other day Lucid Pat we have this conversation about the difference between healing and recovered right yeah so yes I have healed so whether I've recovered to I don't know I mean cancer can come back at any time to anyone who knows right but so far I've definitely outlived that five-year death sentence that they say because I'll be 47 soon so cheers to that every day is a gift it is isn't it it really is those cliches or it's true yeah they're there for a reason yeah yeah so you are continuing on the path of healing and helping other he's others heal it's like in and you do that with your massage and what other modalities is there I mean I know when I was introduced to you there were different types on your website of massage options treatment the hot stones you bring that in the aromatherapy you bring that in I mean just talking you you really help get to know your clients very well in a very short period of time and create a space that is so conducive to healing thank you so tell me how that all transpired the space everything oh wow okay that's a great question you mean how I integrate everything well yeah what I what I do is I call it an integrated visage which that's kind of like an all-encompassing word right I consider myself really a facilitator of other people's healing I really don't I don't call myself a healer I don't consider myself a healer because I feel that mmm things are kind of like I call it the 33 and a third percent rule so this is my own barbarism so I have fun I make stuff up so my my my rule is this that 33 and a third percent is my skill the 33 and a third percent is the receptivity of the person coming in to see me and the other 33 and a third percent is who knows God karma luck whatever you want to call it because I started thinking about what is it that actually heals someone right why is it that you can have the best surgeon in the world and the person really wants to live and they die anyway what happens there there's something there but you still have to have a skilled person and you still have to have like those components there seems to be causes and conditions that need to kind of fit together so so with that said I I do my best every time to show up and I find that everybody has different things that they need so for example if we'll just stick with the Ayurvedic model so a person who's very airy needs some grounding right so that they can make their eye their creative ideas give it some weight right and steadiness because other than that the Nevada person will be all over the place right and they need a little fire to cook it too so ideally a business would have someone who's about a uncovering a bit that you would have all three so how I would address that someone comes in and they're all over the place I might work on their head first and calm them down or their feet bring them more grounding yeah maybe use some more hot towels to bring some some heat if a person has too much heat right then the last thing they want is hot stones and hot towels so maybe I'll bring in some aromatherapy and they get that going on too maybe all you do some percussion you know if kafa comes in and they're very you know like I don't know it's been really tired and I came okay great lie down on the table and I just start doing percussion to get the movement going so it's just it's it's very fun for me I was in India for a month and I got to really see a whole different world I traveled to all over India and then I got to stay at a monastery for about three weeks and massage some of the older monks there and wow yeah that was really lovely and they of course didn't have massage before and then I just you know you in India you just grab whatever you can get so I had like this bucket and then we heat they heat up water and the fire thing outside and then they have a little canister and then you pour it into temper the water and I just like grab but I think it's so open just doing their feet and I thought it was so beautiful to me to see that not only they appreciated it but then how important the feet are and then in grounding in that element so and then I also made some mistakes too I mean there are some older monks that their back hurt and so I thought okay well let me see if I can work on their back and just even to lie down to get into a position maybe line where I could work on their back they couldn't do it and so there's like three or four people trying to get them to get back up again I'm like just get them out of the position don't know you know it's okay we'll just work on their feet or whatever I can do you know and so I learned that it's so crucial to be in the moment and I think one of the reasons again body-mind is that you know why do we lose the moment well either we're bored we don't want we don't want to feel that's really the bottom line being in the present moment I think it's uncomfortable because oh I have to feel bored I have to feel scared I have to feel sad I have to feel happy whatever it is you know or I have to feel uncertainty or I have to feel embarrassed I don't know what to do I don't know what to say but when we sit with it we're just like hi so that's what I do I just kind of I show up and I just go hi human I have no idea why you're here I have no idea why I'm here so how cool is that let's see let's let's see let's discover together and so if I can facilitate a person's journey because you're with you more than I'm with you right and so really you're in charge so all I can do is just maybe help to make you aware of some things that you might have not have been aware of before just like my teachers help me because I think then there's a weight to that when you discover it on your own rather than someone telling you right right it's like that light bulb goes off and you own that yeah you're like oh that's why I keep getting headaches because I keep hitting my head or I walk like this and oh okay or I'm searching I'm in this position no wonder this is happening or I'm not I'm not taking the time to eat properly and focus on my food I think a lot of food I mean I'm not a food addiction specialist but not but I know for myself how many times have you eaten a meal and been like I'm still hungry or did I just eat and then how many times you've eaten a meal and you've been like wow this tastes amazing you could taste almost every single layer and burst of a tomato and whatever right because you you're present and so that's that's my goal is for my own self to stay as centered and present as possible that's one of the things that Norma who's the owner of the Falls General Store so my practice is upstairs of Falls River yoga and we've been talking about me doing some mindfulness meditation classes up there wonderful yeah yeah I mean I've been doing yoga personally for 40 years Wow amazing and but that it sounds amazing but really it's like something you come to come back and yoga is not just physical posture asanas right like I'm not ripped and cut right like that like some amazing other yogis and yoginis are and my mind is still can go all over the place but it's about always coming back coming back coming back and so ever since gone to India in January it's made me even more aware of how important it is to stay when people say oh stay centered what does that mean stay centered here move from here stay grounded in here and it's okay to feel because it passes it's like a storm it's like a Florida storm all of a sudden there's a rainbow from the rain well okay cool so what was the greatest experience that you had in India going every day I would wake up and I literally no joke I would say I'm in India I hardly slept literally you threw just a mixture of being in a new place and just doing what I was doing but the whole journey was just it was great to see other people's perspectives and the freedom of mind in my journey everybody has different journeys wherever they go right it's like a pictures is a thousand words with thousand different people well this was my experience of my own particular journey and I the people that I happen to spend time with they seem to have more space in between thoughts that's the best way that I can articulate it and so therefore that space created a sense of relax relaxedness this sort of freedom to be participant and observer and not react that spaciousness this is what I had been looking for and things will come up so the greatest thing that I learned there was about myself so I'm very narcissistic you know it's all about me right it's like how show me more about me so that I can see you is how I'm looking at it you know I I just I felt this expansiveness I was able to not be so afraid to connect if that makes sense absolutely learn more about generosity I learned more about joy learn more about love I learned more about having fun that's so important we forgot how to play in the society right yes we have we become all wrapped up in fear of what's going to happen well then once you have that and you would think having that cancer experience to me would have right flip the switch it helped flip the switch to want to figure out about life but I still didn't have the sense of wanting to play right I actually went to camp to come to it you know about that mm-hmm okay maybe this is a great place in the islands north hero somewhere around there right and it's a camp for children that have cancer I think it's terminal cancer and they invited me to come up to be one of their massage therapists for the actually that's where not in this one but the other there's another picture of me doing this chair massage they had a first annual like mothers they retreat for the mothers of the children the cancer patients right because the moms are caregivers have the hard hard hard mom yeah especially if their child is gonna die yeah and so there they are they just said for the moms you're taking care of for this night or the weekend whatever it was and they had everything catered they had spa day they had massage therapist reflects out the whole shebang and so I went up and they invited me for the first annual retreat thing that they had there and so I was doing chair massage and all these moms you know and there I was you know and I had avoided doing any kind of cancer related workshops volunteering anything like that because it it still was very close to me and I and I hadn't really processed it and I remember doing that and I took my break and they have a build different buildings with different like the building that we were in was like the main building with for the food and everything and fireplace and so forth the other building was for what do you call it like a wreck house pool table games all that stuff so I remember walking in the pool table and game wreck house and I thought wow these kids play I never played when I was sick they never emphasize the importance of playing and I'm gonna cry now I think about it it makes me very teary-eyed when I went to India they took time to eat three meals a day and snacks in between tea it was always important to nourish your soul eat eat make sure you're eat then rest oh okay see us the time we're going to sleep now I'm like where's everybody going it's noon well we're going to sleep you can't do if you want good night what and then they would just take an app for like an hour or whatever it's hot there too so and then you do your work you work when you work you rest when you rest and that's it there's a balance there so where was the play and then the play was after dinner and I I'm watching these monks these young monks are playing hacky sack but they would find whatever they could you know skipping stones or whatever and they would play around dusk after dinner in between dinner and studying again in the evening and it took me back to when I was in school and my grandmother like do you school work first you know then go out and play then eat and then you know if you need to study even more you can but I just remember sitting back and just watching these kids and I have a picture of it and actually I have a video and I thought wow where did where did we veer off in the society or at least maybe other people have it but where did I veer off where did I forget this balance and that's a great way to end thank you Barbara welcome thank you viewers for tuning in to you and your health let's remember to play we'll help our health we'll help our health physically emotionally and spiritually so yeah go out and play okay until next time namaste