Transcript EP 306 – Biohacking to Feel Younger while Growing Older with Dana Frost

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Dr. Taz: Welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Super Woman Wellness. We’re determined to bring you back to your superpower self. And here’s one of the little things that I’ve learned along the way, is that the more you know about yourself, the better.

And it really does help us understand some of our brightest moments and some of the ones maybe we’re not so proud of. Joining me today is Dana Frost. She’s a wellness expert and host of the Vitally You podcast, shining a light on how you can feel younger, while growing older.

She’s a mind, body, and spirit alchemist.. I love that word, who educates and coaches women towards optimal health, so they can enjoy vibrant lives. She uses the functional nutrition lens, food and nature’s medicine, the wisdom of our own bodies, and the practice of, I’m going to say this wrong, Kaiut Yoga. Is that the right way to say it?

Dana Frost: Kaiut.

Dr. Taz: Kaiut Yoga.

Dana Frost: Kaiut.

Dr. Taz: I’ll have to learn more about that. I thought I knew most of the styles of yoga there. She has a lifelong commitment to continuing education, including certifications as a master life coach, aromatherapist, heart math facilitator, Myers-Briggs facilitator, life therapist, and functional nutrition and lifestyle practitioner. Her rich experience includes navigating the challenges and joys of being a mom for 29 years to five children, 32 years of marriage, and living abroad for 10 years, that all help empower her coaching practice. Welcome to the show, Dana. What a rich life and what a rich sort of educational background, so to speak. And the reason it sort of appeals to me is I probably learned… When was it? Maybe five years ago, five or six years ago. And remember, I’ve been in practice a long time, I’ve been doing my thing for a long time. Five or six years ago, we did the Myers-Briggs.

Dana Frost: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taz: We subsequently did a test, the Enneagram, that many people know about as well. And then, I also came out with my kind of power, or power typing plan as well. And it was fascinating to me, that the Myers-Brigg revealed what I wish I had known when I was 21 or 22 and had stepped into those personality traits, for better or for worse, and understood them, rather than the journey of 20 years to get me to where like, “Oh my gosh, I get it now.” So a lot of this stuff is so powerful and it does connect back to our health. So I want to know, as this sort of alchemist, the way you describe yourself, how, first of all, did you land in this work? And how do you bring all these elements together?

Dana Frost: Well, first, thank you for having me on your show. I really, it’s just a pleasure to be here. And I also have studied Myers-Briggs. I am an INFP.

Dr. Taz: Yes. Okay, good.

Dana Frost: So what are you?

Dr. Taz: I wonder if you can guess, but I’m a classic textbook case of ENTJ. So that is…

Dana Frost: ENTJ.

Dr. Taz: Yes.

Dana Frost: Okay.

Dr. Taz: Yeah. Yeah.

Dana Frost: Yeah.

Dr. Taz: That’s who I am.

Dana Frost: Well, that’s the CEO, embodiment of the CEO.

Dr. Taz: Yeah. And I would’ve never, in my younger years, thought I’d run a business, own a business, have a company, lead, command. I didn’t think I had any of that. I always took the back seat. My identity back then was academic nerd. “I’m going to study and make good grades.” And that was the end of the story. There was none of this other vision. But I think if someone had sparked that or if I had known that, I’d be like, “Hmm, interesting.” And then, every other test, like I got an 8 on the Enneagram. We do this internal testing in the practice, called the Caliper Test, is fascinating. I test the same way there.

So it’s pretty consistent with who I am. And for me, my whole power typing piece, where you merge Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, like the doshas and the meridians and all that stuff with functional kind of thought with hormones and nutrition also is very revealing in the fact of our personality, our wiring drives a lot of our chemistry and vice versa. And then, leads to many of the health issues we face. So this whole piece, this whole element of understanding you and really dialing into you, I think, is so important. But anyhow, I don’t want to talk too much about me, but that’s just been my experience, for sure.

Dana Frost: I agree. It’s been my experience as well. And the different frameworks that we use to understand ourselves better. And that’s why I use that word “alchemy,” because it’s not just one thing. Understanding yourself, we are complex human beings. And when we look at the mind body system, we can view through a different lens to better understand who we are. And the essence of who we are, that really doesn’t change. That’s something that I consider it’s a north star. That’s the part, like the true essence of who you are, it’s a fixed star in the sky, that doesn’t change. But what we know changes is the conditions we’re we are born in, the conditions we’re raised in, even if we just look at where the sky, the stars were, the planets were, when we were born, that also impacts us. So we have life experiences that are unpredictable.

Maybe we have an accident. We may plan to have a baby, but no one would plan to have a divorce. I lived abroad for 10 years. It was something I wanted to do. I didn’t know if I would get to do it. So plant someone in a different culture. And our lives are dynamic on a moment by moment basis. And so, that essence of who we are, it does determine how we are going to respond to the things that happen to us. And if we have trauma, well, that also has this impact. So the things that happen to us that really impact that, the essence of who we are, and it doesn’t change who we are, but the way that we move through something…

Dr. Taz: Is helpful, yeah.

Dana Frost: Is really helpful. And the more we understand about ourselves, I think the, I don’t want to say easier, because I think there are things that just are not easy in life. It doesn’t matter how much you know about yourself, to be human is to experience loss, joys, the wide range of human experiences. And some of them just are not easy. But when we understand ourselves at a deep level, I feel like we can move through them with more resilience and coherence. So we can be coherent in a period that’s really difficult and dark. We can still have coherence in those periods. It’s easier to have coherence and resilience when things are going really well.

Dr. Taz: Very much. So what would you tell somebody who doesn’t have that self-awareness or self knowledge? I want to do a couple things here today. I want to, first of all, this is how you become a little bit more self-aware. So maybe helping folks with that. And then, secondly, how is this self-awareness so important for your health? Because many people think about self-awareness as this empowerment piece that’s about a relationship or about finances or about a career. But I’m very passionate about this self-awareness is also about health, which is a form of empowerment. It is a necessity. So how do we help folks? How do we help them? How do we prevent them from being like me? I’m 40 something years old, finding out that I’m an ENTJ, and that here are my strengths and here are my weaknesses and this is what I need to navigate, moving forward. How do we help them with that?

Dana Frost: Okay. Do you want me to speak into how it impacts our health?

Dr. Taz: Yes.

Dana Frost: How we can know ourselves better. Yeah. Well, I think I can speak from my personal experience and then, just what I’ve experienced with clients. When we lack understanding of who we are at a core level, it makes us more challenging to take dominion in our life. You just imagine, feel yourself in your body and everything that you know about yourself, when you have a deep understanding. Because you know, because you know. There are things, like if you’ve done the Meyers Briggs, you know because you know, because you know, that you have these personality traits. As you mature, you have the benefit or the privilege of playing around with traits that maybe aren’t as strong. When you don’t have that deep inner well of knowing about yourself, it makes it more challenging. There’s less self assurance of taking those steps of dominion in your health.

And I really want to bring this into the conversation as well. If we look at just the neurology of health and healing, this is at least my framework, from an energetic level, we have the narrative, everything that’s happened to us, the way that we’ve been educated, our culture, and that creates our system of beliefs. And from that, we are going to have emotional responses to the things that happen on a moment by moment basis. Those emotions create an energetic impulse throughout the system that is chemically linked. So we have the nervous system, that’s receiving this emotional reaction, from the mind body system. There’s the energy that gets exchanged. There’s chemicals that get released, and there’s the communication, like all the organs respond, there’s communication that happens through the vagus nerve, automatically, simultaneously. All of this is happening, physiologically, energetically, and on an emotional level.

The more that we know and understand ourselves, the better we are equipped to then act in a way where we are taking dominion. We’re able to be at a point of choice that is inspired by wisdom and insight of who we really are as a person. I can tell you I made a decision, in my early thirties, to adopt two children with my husband. We were living in South America and we had this vision to adopt, early in our marriage, when we were living in Minneapolis. And we saw other families. It was the nineties pre-adoption being in fashion. And there were families, who were adopting children, who were not mixed race children in the southern part of the US, who weren’t wanted. And they were bringing them into their families, where they already had children, and blending lots of different backgrounds in this one community that we were a part of.

And we were really inspired to do that. You think when you’re younger you know yourself, but part of the maturation process is getting to know yourself at deeper and deeper levels. So fast forward, without going into all the details, we were living in South America. We had three biological children that we left the US with, and we decided to adopt two children. There was no way that I had the self knowledge that that, for my personality type, was actually going to be a very heavy lift, for me. I thought I’m a social worker by education, by higher education. I was a practicing social worker. I had been reading about self-help and knowing yourself for forever at that point in my life, for my first decade, I would say, my first decade of being an adult. So my twenties. So I’m in my thirties.

I thought I knew myself and I thought I was prepared. And the gift of making a decision, where I think I did step out, in terms of what my constitution was. If we just think about it, we all have a specific constitution. I stepped out of that constitution. And was I able to learn what I needed to learn? Yes. Was I able to grow? Yes. I expanded, but it was really, really difficult. And as I learned more about myself, I realized it was going a little bit against the essence of who I was. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Dana Frost: And I haven’t done the Enneagram. I would like to. I’ve heard about it for 30 years, I’ve heard about the Enneagram. I don’t know why I’ve never… I just need to invest and do that for myself. But I think that, as we get to know ourselves, it really empowers us to have the dominion that we want to have. And I’m 56 and I have been curious. We can’t know everything when we’re 20. We can’t know everything when we’re 30. We can’t know everything when we’re 40. And part of that sage wisdom that we gain through the decades is getting to know ourselves, if we are willing. It’s a big investment. And as women, we’re working, maybe whether our baby is a career or if it’s a career and physical children, women tend to move in lots of different directions of responsibility. And sometimes, it is hard for women to take the time to make that investment in themselves, because there’s so much investment out in the outward world. Does that make sense?

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So what would you tell women to do? They are of any age watching the show or listening today, they have different responsibilities, different things pulling at them. What is it that they should do, particularly, I think, if someone is in transition or if someone is about to embark on a new life stage or phase? What’s a good way for them to maybe dial in and check themselves a little bit before they move forward?

Dana Frost: I love that question so much. I love that question. And I don’t like to tell people what to do. And this is why. I have a lot of things that I’d like to say about this, but the answers really reside inside of each person. And so, what I would say to do, first and foremost, get quiet. Get quiet, spend time without distractions. Spend time where your phone is in focus mode and you’re not checking. You are not engaged with the outside world. The outside world has so many suggestions, strong suggestions, about what we should do and what the right answer is for us. And really getting quiet and tuning in to your wise inner teacher, I think it’s really the first step. And I found that to be through my breath and that sounds kind of silly and simplistic. But if we look at the significance of the breath, it’s the first thing that happens when we enter the world from our mother’s womb.

We take a breath. And the last thing we do as we are transitioning, however you consider that transition, is we take our last breath. We stop breathing. And so, when that life, the breath is the, I see it. And when we look at the word “breath” in ancient languages, it’s spirit. And so, when we quiet ourselves and we connect with our breath, I’ll take that one step further, when we look at the breath and the nervous system, it regulates our heart rate variability. And through the vagus nerve, that goes from the brain, travels through the organs down to the stomach and then, sends information. It’s the information highway. It also is sending through simple breathing techniques, you can harmonize your heart rate variability. This is where this alchemy of our mind, body, spirit is. If we just get quiet with a breath and we bring our attention to it and it’s deep, slow, quiet, regular, that, alone, you’re saying, “I’m going to turn my eyes inward to my wise inner teacher.”

And for me, the gateway really is the breath. And then, when we think about the heart and the insight and wisdom from the heart, when we are tuning into the breath and this is heart math, inhale and excel from the heart center, that’s when we really are tuning into the wisdom from the heart, that has, inside of each one of us, lies the answers that are true for us. Now, do we want helpers? Do we want a framework, like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram? Yes, but which one to do? I say look into them. So if you’re in the middle of a life transition, go review some of the frameworks for understanding yourself and decide which one resonates most with you. And then, just start following, really relax and follow your curiosity. Let curiosity be your guide and begin gathering or mining. I like to say, we’re mining information about ourselves.

What feels good? Where does your body relax? Where do you constrict? I have my clients do a seven day, 24 hour tracking about the way they spend their time, who they spend their time with, the weather, the atmosphere that they’re around. Does it agree with them? Does it not agree with them? There are so many ways that we can track. And even there’s so much focus on food today, I think to a point where it can almost be paralyzing. But just notice, “When I eat this, this is how I feel.” And you can begin to gather a lot of information about your own constitution, when you begin to do that exploration for yourself. Does that make sense?

Dr. Taz: Very much. So I think it’s, again, dialing into mindfulness, dialing into the breath, dialing into quiet, which is what the majority of women don’t have. So trying to find, I think, the quiet time, it sounds like, is the first step, to be alone with yourself. I’ve been craving that, to be a hundred percent honest. It’s just to go somewhere and be completely alone for a couple of days and be able to dial into myself a little bit. Because there’s so much noise around me and constantly pulled in a lot of different directions. So it sounds like that’s the first step.

Dana Frost: It is.

Dr. Taz: And whether you use a test or a tool or a journal or yoga or whatever it is, that might lead you to the answers within yourself. I love data. I love looking at hard facts and then being able to extrapolate. But that might not resonate, to your point, that might not resonate with everyone. I’m curious though, because there are two things in your intro that I want to make sure we all understand. I want to come back to the Kaiut Yoga. What is that specifically? And what does a light therapist do?

Dana Frost: So light therapy, so we all have a light body. That’s the heat that emanates from your body. That is considered your light body. And that can be measured on different devices. So the sun would be the original light therapy. It’s just the sun. We know how we feel when we have sunshine. Why do people have seasonal affective disorder? Lack of sunlight. So that’s the original light therapy is the sun. I was introduced to an at home light therapy device that has different rays of light and it pulses into your skin. It’s a different size of pads that pulse into your skin. They’re not audible, but they’re vibrations. And those vibrations, if you just put light on your skin, let’s just say this lamp that I have in front of me, well, that lamp, it’s just light. It’s not making an impact on my skin. There’s no vibration there.

But when you have real light therapy, that’s coming through different rays of light, touching the skin with a vibration, it actually creates biological shifts in your body. There’s a communication through your skin. There’s communication with your brain to do different biological processes. So what we know, legally, what you can say light therapy can do, it decreases inflammation, it decreases pain, and it increases blood flow. So we know the sun does all of that as well. So when light therapy, that’s kind of why I use that, because I’ve studied light therapy. And then, there’s another form of light therapy, that’s in the form of a patch. I don’t know if you can see this. It looks like a round bandaid. Yes. So this is a company called Lifewave, and what Lifewave is doing, it’s using the energy in your body, so the light in your body, the heat in your body, that activates this patch that’s been programmed with nano crystal technology.

The patches are put on acupoints. So we’re using the traditional Chinese medicine meridians. And that crystal formation, like a sacred geometry formation, sends a message to the brain to do different biological processes. Like this is for glutathione. So it’s not transdermal. It’s not transdermal, but it’s telling your brain, “Produce, activate glutathione in the body.” So it’s very cool. It’s tapping into the body’s innate ability to heal our bodies. We’re designed with an intelligent immune system. And what happens… So the body knows how to heal. The challenge is that it gets weighed down. We get weighed down by exposure to toxins, traumas, and our thought processes. The body gets weighed down and the immune system is flacid. Our cells, that should be plump and active and robust, become deflated. And the fuel in the cell is lacking the full force of what it needs to be healthy and to bring the body into homeostasis.

So these patches, that are considered light therapy, that’s what they’re doing. They’re using the body as the energy source and then, sending a signal to the brain to do different things, like we’ve got two stem cell patches, “elevate these two different copper peptides to activate your body’s stem cells.”

Dr. Taz: So cool.

Dana Frost: So light therapy, there are many people who say light therapy is the future of medicine. There’s a lot of stem cell therapy as well. And so, there are two different lights, besides nature, there are two different light therapies that I use for clients, when it comes to optimizing their health.

Dr. Taz: That’s fascinating. And what kind of results have you seen, out of curiosity?

Dana Frost: Improved sleep, unbelievable benefits with energy, skin. The stem cell patches actually have skin, because stem cells remodel your skin. This one copper peptide, and the company has research, but also, there’s just research on these copper peptides and when they get elevated, what happens? So rapid wound relief. I said, energy, sleep, mood. So when people have anxiety and depression, improvement in mood, decreased pain, knee issues being resolved. My mother, who has really bad arthritis, her arthritis pain has been diminished considerably, noticeably. Those are the kinds of things that we see. Improved digestion, decreased inflammation. So people who have achy arthritis in their hands, are able to walk. I had one woman, who was really not able to walk. Yes, she could walk, but it was just pain, constant pain when she would walk. And now, she’s like, “I have no more pain. I had pain throughout my body. I have no more pain.” They’re quite dramatic actually, the results are.

Dr. Taz: That’s pretty impressive. And then, what about, before I let you go, Kaiut Yoga? What is that?

Dana Frost: Yeah, so Kaiut Yoga, so Kaiut is a last name in Portuguese. It comes from the founder of the method, the creator of the Kaiut Yoga Method. His name is Francisco Kaiut, and he comes from a chiropractic yoga background. He created this method of yoga that doesn’t really look like any other yoga you’ve seen. It is a series. There are hundreds of different sequences, but a series of poses that you move through, these series of poses. There’s no music and it really is harmonizing the nervous system. It’s tapping into the nervous system. You’re accessing. We work on three girdles. The shoulder girdle, the hip girdle, and the ankle girdle. And from a musculoskeletal perspective, they’re all connected. So if one is out, you actually have an issue with all three. So we’re accessing the joints. In the Kaiut Yoga Method, if there’s constriction, it’s because the joints are lacking range of motion.

And if we think about how our modern life keeps us in a chair most of the time, and as we age, we move away from the floor. As we age, we move away from using our joints, in really how the musculoskeletal system is designed to be used. And so, when we don’t access the joints to the full capacity, they become dormant, if you will, and their ability to move the way they were designed to move. So Kaiut Yoga is a beginning to open this up to the full range of motion in our joints, which taps into the nervous system. When we have issues stuck in our tissues in the nervous system, from the Kaiut Yoga perspective, it’s the nervous system in the joints that you have to access.

Dr. Taz: Fascinating, Oh my goodness, so much great information, so many great tools to help with healing, self-awareness, recovery, transitions. It’s all putting it together for you. That’s the alchemy of it. I love that word so much. If anyone listening today wants to connect with you, tell us a little bit about your platform and what they would be able to learn from you, kind of moving forward. Give us a sense of that.

Dana Frost: Yeah, so I would like to mention a couple things. I have a podcast, it’s called Vitally You, Feeling Younger, Growing Older, because I do believe we can. And it’s not about looking younger as you grow older, it’s really feeling vitally who you really are in the essence of who you are and not allowing… Typically, the way that the culture has aged, it just allows gravity. And we have this acceptance that “growing older, I’m going to have aches and pains. Growing older, I’m going to have a diminished range of motion.” Which really doesn’t have to be true. So I would invite them to the podcast Vitally You. We will put a link to Tips for Daily Vitality, and then, you can find me at danafrost.com. Instagram, Dana Frost VitallyYou. And yeah, those would be the places to…

Dr. Taz: Those would be the places to go. Well, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking time out today to join us. We appreciate it. And then, for everybody else watching and listening, grab onto these tools. I think the first step is finding quiet time in the midst of everything we’ve signed up for. And then, the second is listening to the breath and then, taking the wisdom of the breath and turning your journey moving forward. Thank you all for watching and listening to this episode of Super Woman Wellness. Remember, you can rate and review it and share it with your friends. You also, if you post a review on Apple, iTunes, or Spotify, I’ll send you a free bottle of Boost. Just email me. It’s hello@drtaz.com. I’ll see you guys next time.