mBraining – Beth Gray is a training life coach who asks questions that sometimes make others uncomfortable but helps them to solve problems, providing them with security and direction.
0:00 Strange Sensations in my body
10:36 A dad at 22
12:54 Working too many hours
17:15 Looking for tools to heal
20:40 My introduction to mBraining
24:45 A little old lady
29:01 Get a coach
34:52 Preparing my doctors for surgery
38:58 I can’t walk
42:28 The benefit of doing inner work
45:55 The problem with a great mindset
Transcript:
Bill 0:00
So from February 2012, I had noticed those strange sensations in my body, you know, the
Beth Gray 0:07
right.
Bill 0:08
My chest was feeling weird. And my belly was doing strange things.
Beth Gray 0:13
Well, of course, it was there. There, they are making new connections. Yeah, absolutely. And there, and they’re stepping up to the plate. This is beautiful.
Bill 0:24
I’ve got no idea what is going on. I know these things are happening. And I don’t know what they are. I can’t like to reconcile them
Beth Gray 0:30
that there’s not a doctor in the world who would have explained that to you.
Bill 0:33
Not a doctor, not a human, nobody on the planet. And then I’m in the room with these two guys who explain within the first few days exactly what I’m experiencing. And I’m going, Yes, that’s what I’m experiencing. That’s me. Oh, my God, I had all these blinding flashes of the obvious; it was a surreal experience. And then, they take us through the first experience, which will be suitable for connecting to our heart and gut. And wow
Beth Gray 1:08
And suddenly, it all makes sense that expanding chest space, that expansion in your gut, absolutely, yeah,
Bill 1:18
The entire world changed.
Intro 1:24
This is recovery after a stroke with Bill Gasiamis. Helping you go from where you are to where you’d rather be
Bill 1:31
Bill from recoveryafterstroke.com
In this podcast episode, I am being interviewed by Beth Gray. The topic we discuss is the tools I used to manage the emotional turmoil many stroke survivors experience after a bleed in the brain or ischemic stroke.
My experience with emotions meant that I ranged very dramatically from being relatively calm and OK to very angry or very emotional, and at the time, it was tough to manage that experience and that range of extreme emotions. Now, if you’re experiencing this emotional turmoil, it’s pretty standard. It may not be pleasant, but it is quite normal.
Your first time going through a lot of reprocessing of what you’ve just experienced, you’re trying to understand what happened in your life just now that led you to a stroke. And perhaps you’re, for the first time, considering your mortality. And all that stuff is standard. That’s what I went through.
The thing about it is that this experience doesn’t have to be a terrible one. It’s new information that’s coming to the surface. If you know what to do with how to pay attention to it and how to use it to your advantage, you can get a lot from this experience. And you could harness the energy that you’re experiencing to serve you much better.
In my case, you’ll hear in the interview that I was talking about my heart coming back online and my gut coming back online, but my head switching off. And suppose this is something you’ve experienced. In that case, this heart and soul coming back online is your body’s way of helping you overcome the challenges your brain is undergoing or has experienced. And it’s keeping you and bringing forward new neuronal structures and new intelligence to help guide you along your journey.
This has been a fascinating experience for me in the last seven years. However, it may be difficult for you right now. Suppose you change the way that you look at these. In that case, In that case,. In that case, you may be able to use this to expand and become more aware and translate the messages coming from your body, emphasizing healing the brain in the hospital and after a stroke.
Many people I speak to talk about not dealing with the emotional trauma and distress they experience after a stroke. Many years pass in their recovery before they even start to consider whether or not they need to go down the path of counseling, some coaching, or some therapy related to healing the emotional trauma of their stroke experience.
I genuinely believe that the key to my success was that most of my work in my stroke recovery was all on the emotional side of rallying. Within two days of being released from the hospital for the first time, I was in a counseling session with a psychologist.
After that, I continued to go to counseling and then sought the services of a life coach who was able to help me understand what was happening in my body, along with the support of the counselor, and get to the bottom of how to overcome this emotional turmoil and how to harness that energy and to use it to my benefit.
It’s what I would suggest and recommend for many people going through stroke recovery, and I have put a lot of emphasis on healing the body and the brain, which I get; it’s lovely to be doing that. But at the same time, we mustn’t neglect emotional intelligence and give ourselves the emotional support we need to overcome.
What I haven’t talked about much on the podcast until now is that I’m a trained coach and have achieved fantastic success with clients from many different backgrounds in overcoming the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.
Some of those challenges included stage fright, Bulimia, overcoming the trauma associated with abuse as a younger person, and a whole range of other traumatic experiences that we all go through in life that we don’t realize affect us on an ongoing basis as our life continues to evolve, and then add up to become a more dramatic issue later on down in life when there are so many traumatic events that we haven’t dealt with. And now they’re all coming to us all at once. And we don’t know how to overcome them, or we don’t know where to start to overcome them.
I’ve helped people from all walks of life and all different backgrounds. Bugen genuinely loves supporting stroke survivors, helping them overcome some of the challenges of stroke recovery. Stroke recovery is an ongoing journey. And it’s going to test you many, many times. And if there are things that are coming up that you’re experiencing after your stroke journey, they’ve likely been with you for your entire life. But you haven’t had the resources or the insight to go ahead and tackle those challenges, deal with them, and leave them in the past where they belong so that they are not traumatizing you as you continue to go forward.
Being re-traumatized by events that have wounded you in the past while you’re recovering from a stroke makes the recovery more complicated. So, just before we get stuck into the episode, I’ll leave you with one more thought.
How much better would your life be now? Could you overcome some of these long-term traumatic experiences you’re reliving? What could you do? That you haven’t been able to do? What joy? Could you experience that you haven’t been able to share? And how could you just evolve into a better version of yourself that you haven’t been able to yet because you didn’t know where to start to deal with the trauma you’ve accumulated throughout life, let alone the trauma you have experienced due to stroke?
I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast. Please feel free to contact me with any questions regarding the coaching services I offer and whether or not they will be right for you moving forward.
Now, Beth Gray is a life coach. She also practices in the modality of multiple brain integration techniques, or mBraining, and you can contact Beth at BethGray.coach And I’ll have all the links in the show notes. So, if you want to find out more, you can either get in touch with me, or you can get in touch with Beth.
Beth Gray 9:24
So, I want to welcome today the joy of interviewing Bill Gasiamis. Is that how you pronounce your last name?
Bill 9:34
Beautiful Beth.
Beth Gray 9:36
OK, now Bill is another mBraining, mBit coach, but he’s got an extraordinary story because you are a survivor of not one stroke. But I believe three. Is that correct?
Bill 9:53
Indeed, I do things well when I do them
Beth Gray 9:56
Yeah, yeah. Right.
Beth Gray 10:00
And what I’m starting to branch out in my interviews in the mBraining series is to go past just chapter nine and get into what different coaches and different people in the mBraining community, really hands-on using mBraining for and their individual stories because there are so many amazing stories within mBraining. So, Bill, I’m going to ask you to tell us to give us a bit more of your background. And how did you come to where you are today?
Bill 10:36
Yeah, I’ll give you the short version of the background. And Beth, because I could talk forever, people don’t want to do that. So in, look, really it started for me in 1996, my, my girlfriend at the time, and I was young, I was 21 and my wife, who’s my girlfriend, then who’s my wife now, was 25. And we were expecting the birth of our son. And,
Beth Gray 11:10
Wow, uh huh.
Bill 11:11
Yeah, so it’s pretty full-on. So, if you imagine what’s going on at 21 and 25 when people are,
Beth Gray 11:18
right,
Bill 11:19
don’t have any reference structures for how to live a life. And then you’re bringing this child into the world; what happens is you, you do the best you can with the available resources.
Beth Gray 11:34
Absolutely.
Bill 11:35
For me, I didn’t have a lot of resources. So I was running around the place, I was running around area lace, working three jobs,
Beth Gray 11:46
wow,
Bill 11:48
in doing lots of hours, doing a little bit of self-care, and not paying attention to my
Beth Gray 11:57
A little bit of self-care is that an understatement?
Bill 12:00
That is, I was doing a little bit of self-care and doing nothing regarding self-care. I was doing all the stuff that most people get stuck in doing. And then what happens one day is they wake up and think about what I have been doing all these years. So I didn’t know that I was doing that. But I had started doing that back then.
Beth Gray 12:23
Wow,
Bill 12:23
Later four years later, our second son came onto the scene. And it was just reinforcing. It reinforced that I needed to keep doing everything: working hard, not doing a lot of self-care, and not paying attention to my body doing all those things. And then, in a property maintenance business, you can work 18 hours a day if you want to
Beth Gray 12:52
easily Yes.
Bill 12:54
And although I was on the tools for eight or nine hours a day, there was a lot of paperwork or that type of thing. And I was so in my head that in fast forward. In February of 2012, I experienced a blood vessel in my brain bursting.
Beth Gray 13:11
Right?!
Bill 13:12
And when the
Beth Gray 13:1,3
So, in your head, as you say,
Bill 13:15
I was so in my head that my pressure was up; everything was up like there was just so much over-processing. And then, I experienced numbness on my left side for seven days before I did anything about it.
Beth Gray 13:34
Oh, because you were too busy. Of course,
Bill 13:36
Everything was in my head; my head told me nothing was wrong. Nothing is going on. And, of course, I ignored my gut instinct. And my heart wasn’t on the scene. So it was, you know, a passenger in this whole thing. And I was working to make money to provide a bigger house to have a better car to do all those things that would do
Beth Gray 13:58
Of course. Yeah. You know, taking care of the necessities. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Bill 14:08
So when the blood vessel started to leak, I went through the process of going to the hospital, and I was in the hospital for seven days. And 14 days after the initial episode, I was sent home and told not to work, drive, or do anything strenuous for six weeks until my checkup. And that was to determine whether the bleeding was going to be whether it kept bleeding or stopped bleeding, and then they were going to choose a course of action.
So
Beth Gray 14:44
Wow,
Yeah, so six weeks later, I bled again. It didn’t stop bleeding in those six weeks, but it bled again, but very dramatically.
Bill 14:54
And that second bleed was where I started to pay attention for the first time. And what I noticed was that I couldn’t finish sentences. I had a lot of cognitive issues. I didn’t understand what people were asking me. I didn’t recognize my wife at one point. I didn’t know my name. Everything was
Bill 15:20
Everything was gone. So, it was scary. Beth, it’s terrifying. Yeah. And I had no fundamental tools to check back on myself to support myself going forward. I didn’t understand how I would get my brain around and make the most of it before I took it for granted.
Beth Gray 15:48
Of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Bill 15:51
It was it
Beth Gray 15:52
because you know what, you know, of all the things I miss the most, you know, I miss my health the most? Yeah, absolutely.
Bill 16:00
I was healthy before the bleed. But it turns out I wasn’t. I was doing many things that created a perfect storm to make me unwell.
Beth Gray 16:09
Right.
Bill 16:10
And then I
Beth Gray 16:11
noticed, on your site, that you have a lot of articles about all those things and those factors in your lifestyle that we’re adding up to that perfect storm.
Bill 16:24
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll put a couple of a few of those things. Most people will relate to these. smoking, drinking, not sleeping enough, not eating correctly. Not finding a way to de-stress or take time for myself. I was doing stuff for other people, not things I found joyous and loved doing, just things for money. So, I think I was like the majority of the population. I didn’t see myself being
Beth Gray 16:58
How old were you when you had the stroke?
Bill 17:02
So, I was 37.
Beth Gray 17:04
Wow.
young,
Bill 17:07
real young. And my children were by then they were 12 and 16. Yeah.
Beth Gray 17:14
Wow.
Bill 17:15
tough days. So, I was looking for a tool to find a way to heal. And I had a fantastic friend who was kind of somebody I knew. Still, it wasn’t, wasn’t a real friend at the time; they were just on the periphery of my friendship group, somebody I’d met, who said, hey, there’s this thing going on in a couple of weeks in this small dentists, boardroom or office somewhere in Melbourne. And it’s about this thing called mBraining. And anyway, it’s a perfect thing. Next, why don’t you come along and do this course?
OK,
And I thought, I don’t know what you are talking
Beth Gray 18:00
You weren’t a coach or an NLP coach or anything when you went into mBraining.
Bill 18:05
So, I have a coaching certificate. About eight years ago, I learned how to be a coach because I wanted to use those skills in the coaching environment. But when I came, but for my business, you know, to turn my
Beth Gray 18:24
Yes, yeah, guys are excellent workers. You know,
I did that. I mean, that was that was my whole entrance into coaching. All the training I did was simply for my staff. It prepared me for mentoring instead of seeing myself as a coach; I was merely investing in myself to do a better job as a boss. That was it.
Bill 18:49
That’s it. And that’s a great thing to do. However, I realized that the time and I and I realized at the time that I needed coaching; I needed
Beth Gray 19:00
Did you get it?
Bill 19:01
And I did. I went and got coaching and counseling. But guess what? I got a full bed. How to make more money?
Oh, of course you did, of course you did. Isn’t that what we all start doing coaching for?
I wanted to know how to make more money out of my business. I needed to make more money from this And from that, and it wasn’t
Beth Gray 19:23
It wasn’t about yourself care?
Bill 19:25
No, no, it wasn’t. So, my brain was doing its thing, and I looked at it. Of course, yeah. But I regret that. It’s just what it did. You see, it’s just how my program was running at the time, you know?
Beth Gray 19:39
Yeah.
Bill 19:39
So
Beth Gray 19:41
When you get into that, how does that change your recovery process?
Bill 19:51
Well, it does it from day one. It is the most amazing.
Beth Gray 19:55
OK,
Bill 19:56
So I’m in this concert. I mean, so, I’m in there with these two strange guys at the front of the room, a tall one, Grant, and this shorter guy,
Beth Gray 20:08
right?
Bill 20:09
That is Japanese-looking, but it sounds American.
Beth Gray 20:14
But yes, exactly, Marvin.
Bill 20:18
This is bizarre, like, these are the oddest couple ever. But anyhow, come along for the ride. And, of course, I had no idea about these types of events because I’d never been to one. The first thing they do is go around the room, and they say we need people to go around the room and introduce themselves.
Beth Gray 20:36
OK, yep. Standard, standard standard. Let’s open up and introduce myself. Yes,
Bill 20:40
yeah. Well, that’s a standard for me then. So I just said, I’ve had a stroke and two bleeds by now. And I’m struggling to understand if my brain will come back online. And I started crying. And I said I don’t know if it will come back online. The first is because I took it for granted in the past. Now. I’m wondering if it’s ever going to return to normal, and I remember both Grant and Marvin, I believe, said in their own words, ” Well, you don’t have to worry about that. Because what you have is you have this other intelligence that can support the brain in your recovery? And that was 15 or 20 minutes in Beth. And I’m like, What?
Beth Gray 21:30
Oh, my goodness, I just got goosebumps. I just got goosebumps. That’s beautiful.
Bill 21:38
I could not believe what I was hearing and that I was in the room where the people were saying that stuff. And I’m like, OK, now I’m strapped in. You tell me what’s next. I’m on. I’m on.
Beth Gray 21:50
I, yeah. Yeah.
Bill 21:52
So, to give you an idea, the best way to describe it now is that my head has completely switched off. I had noticed in the months leading up because of the coach, so it was in November 2012. So from February 2012, I had seen those strange sensations in my body, you know, the
Beth Gray 22:12
right
Bill 22:13
My chest was feeling weird. And my belly was doing weird things.
Beth Gray 22:18
Well, of course, it was there. They’re there. They’re making new connections. Yeah, absolutely. And they’re, and they’re stepping up to the plate. This is beautiful.
Bill 22:29
Oh, but I’ve got no idea what is going on. I know these things are happening. And I don’t know what they are. I can’t like to reconcile
Beth Gray 22:36
that there’s not a doctor in the world who would have explained that to you.
Bill 22:39
Not a doctor, not a human, nobody on the planet. And then I’m in the room with these two guys who explain within the first few days exactly what I’m experiencing. And I’m going, Yes, that’s what I’m experiencing. That’s me. Oh, my God. And I just had all these blinding flashes of the obvious. It was just a surreal experience. And then they take us through the first experience where we get to connect to our heart and connect to our gut. And wow.
Beth Gray 23:14
And suddenly, it all makes sense that expanding chest space, that expansion in your gut. Absolutely Yeah.
Bill 23:23
The whole world changed, Beth.
Beth Gray 23:28
Right. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful.
Bill 23:34
Yeah. And I will tell you a fantastic story that happened that weekend. So I’m experiencing these things. And there wasn’t any discussion about entrainment then and about how I didn’t understand completely how, you know, the heart has a magnetic field that resonates out, you know,
Beth Gray 23:53
the whole heart app and exactly, yeah, OK,
Bill 23:55
I didn’t know any of that. And I’ve gone into a Kmart in Australia, we have a Kmart and were in the morning because I was overweight. I had, I had taken some steroid medication, and I was fat. And I was embarrassed because the T-shirts that I had were too tight. And
Beth Gray 24:14
OK,
Bill 24:14
I hadn’t done anything about my clothing, you know, not fitting me for all those months. And then, that morning of the second or the morning of the second day, I walked to Kmart just as it opened. And I bought myself a couple of T-shirts. I put my T-shirts on, then my one T-shirt, and then I went to training.
But on the way in, I was stopped at the electric doors by this old lady in a frame in a walking frame.
Beth Gray 24:44
Uh-huh.
Bill 24:45
And she was taking forever to go through the door. And I needed to rush. But something made me aware of her. For the first time in my life, I noticed other people properly. And I just stopped. Yeah. And I walked behind her. And she she noticed I was there. And she just said, you can go past. And I said, I’m happy to sit and wait; I’m all good. And then she told me his story about how she was never supposed to walk again. And wow,
Beth Gray 25:24
Oh my goodness, breathe, just breath
Bill 25:29
She was never supposed to walk again. And she was walking. These steps took an unbelievable amount of time to gain her independence. And I think it took us 10 or 15 minutes to walk to the Kmart. And we just got to know each other. And we left. And again, I was just blown away. There are too many things connecting that
right
I had never experienced this in my life. And it’s only day two.
Beth Gray 26:00
It just happened that. Yes. Right then and there. Yep. Beautiful. Amazing. Yeah.
Bill 26:07
So what happens is we go through the four days, and I come home, I tell my children and my wife, and everybody, and I take them through the exercises that we did there just so that they can experience it, and you know, they are 12 and 16 they don’t care. But they do enough. They care enough about Dad.
Beth Gray 26:27
They care about you enough that let’s humor Dad. Yeah.
Bill 26:33
So I’d like to say that they also started to get that experience from day one. And now they’re developing into excellent, heart-centered, courageous, compassionate, and creative kids. I’ve seen them transform from being like I was when I was a kid to being better versions of themselves in this time. It’s been amazing. So that happened, and that started to happen then.
And then Grant, at the end of the four days, said to me, You need to become a trainer. So I don’t know, what does that even mean? I don’t even know what to do with this certificate yet. What does it mean to be a trainer? So I did the training. I did the movement; I learned, trained, coached, and became a trainer.
And I ran three or four coach certifications where we had a fantastic experience. And we were lucky enough to have Grant come into our room one day to do an open frame at the front of the room. Awesome. Yeah, I have all those recordings. So they’re great. And I’ve just then, as I’ve started to train mBraining, the essential message I want to get out there is that it starts to become more embodied.
Beth Gray 28:04
Absolutely.
Bill 28:05
Yes. So you have the experience of somebody taking you through an embracing session well, then I took a mBraining coach on for about 12 months who coached me after coach, cert,
Beth Gray 28:17
right? Yes, yeah.
Bill 28:19
And
Beth Gray 28:20
and that is transformational. Because last year, I was doing the energetics training. And so Wendy, Bruce, Sarah Wayland, and I got together as part of the energetics program. And we’re like, we’ll train each other and energetics for three months. Well, here we are 12 months later, and we still meet weekly to coach each other.
Bill 28:44
Yeah.
Beth Gray 28:47
And I, that is priceless.
Bill 28:49
Yeah. It is the best part of it is being coached. So if you’re a coach that wants to coach people with mBraining, get mBraining coach and get coached. And
Beth Gray 29:00
absolutely,
Bill 29:01
I cannot emphasize it enough. And I say to everyone who attended my coach certifications, if you do nothing else, get somebody to coach you for the next however long you like.
Beth Gray 29:12
Exactly.
Bill 29:13
So, training it at the front of the room while being coached embodies
and immersed in it.
Yeah, it embodies the whole process, the whole procedure, and you find little beautiful, additional bits that you don’t expect to come up, you know, emerge up.
Beth Gray 29:34
Yeah absolutely
Bill 29:36
And, you say connections were in the past; you missed connections.
Beth Gray 29:41
Right.
Bill 29:42
And, for me, I’ve still got two years to go before brain surgery. So, this tool will be invaluable in preparing me for brain surgery and what’s to come after that.
Beth Gray 29:54
Right.
Bill 29:55
I don’t know that then, but I am going in and checking in with myself. As a result of everything that I’ve experienced. With all the new awareness that I have, I stopped smoking. I stopped drinking, I started to change my diet, I began to change the way that I was being on the planet and the amount of work that I was doing
Beth Gray 30:14
and your self-care. Absolutely, yeah.
Bill 30:16
And everything turned around. I did this crazy one at about, I would say, about two or three months after mBraining Coach certification, And I was, without knowing it, being guided to prepare my body for surgery that was to come in November of 2014.
Right? Yeah. Because then you have the third stroke, right?
Yeah. So everything’s going great. The bleeding starts to get better, stopping bleeding so much. And then, one day, I went for a bike ride. I haven’t been on a bike ride now for nearly three years. And I decided I was going for a bike. It started to feel unique,
right?
The following day, I woke up with this strange burning sensation on my left side.
Beth Gray 31:09
Again,
Bill 31:10
I felt like I was in the sun; this left side had been burnt, and this side hadn’t. That was pretty weird.
Beth Gray 31:19
Do you listen to your body? This time
I did. I drove straight to the hospital.
Bill 31:26
When I got to the hospital, I told the triage nurses. I said, quick, get me in because I’m having a stroke. And they were like, What are you talking about? And get me inside of my stroke. You know, this stuff is going on. I’ve had a show before. So I know what’s going on. They said give us your name. First, I noted there was no time for that. Get me inside
Beth Gray 31:46
OK
Bill 31:52
this thing. I gave them my name. They confirmed I wasn’t telling stories. And then they took me to CT. And they found that they had another bleed. And then a little while later, my surgeon came in and said, ” Look, we’ve managed to avoid surgery for all this time, but we can’t avoid it now. What we need is we need to go in, and we need to resolve this matter, and it’s going to be it’s going to be an outcome; It’s going to be a great outcome because we’re going to fix it, and it won’t bleed again. And that’s what we’re going to do. Are you up for it? And I said I was up for it. There, I’ ‘ve done all the work I’ve prepared myself. I know whatever happens can be a fantastic outcome.
Beth Gray 32:38
Yeah. OK.
Bill 32:40
Wow. So we booked the surgery for a couple of weeks.
Beth Gray 32:45
OK, so it wasn’t immediate
Bill 32:47
money. The week three days after I left the hospital after the third incident, I had a phone call with my mother-in-law. On Tuesday, she finished by saying I love you and I told her that I love her.
Beth Gray 33:13
Right?
Bill 33:14
And then
Unknown Speaker 33:18
breath, and then a couple of days later, she passes.
Beth Gray 33:23
Oh, wow.
Importance of saying I love you when you finish a call. Yeah.
Bill 33:37
So it was, so now we’re preparing for a funeral.
Beth Gray 33:45
And while you’re preparing for surgery, Yeah.
Bill 33:50
Yeah. So it was tough. I needed the tools I had gained all those years to keep me in the zone for surgery while caring for my wife and our family.
Yeah,
And we are being able to manage and control all that stuff. Who is that lovely person in the background?
Beth Gray 34:17
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Little Miss Five. You know, Mommy, can you talk to me right now? No, I’m still on the call. OK. So,
Bill 34:30
So what happened, Beth, was I wasn’t allowed to be a pallbearer. Because I couldn’t
Beth Gray 34:36
Of course not
Bill 34:37
risk another bleed.
Yeah. Yeah.
So we went into, we got through their funeral. And that was tough. And we scraped through it. And now my wife’s preparing for me to go into surgery.
Beth Gray 34:52
Yeah.
Bill 34:52
So, of course, I wanted a great outcome because I didn’t want my wife to deal with anything else in such a short time. Exactly. Yeah. And, of course, she’s thinking, possibly, This will be a terrible time for us. Because if he comes out, or it doesn’t come out of this, well, then what’s going to happen? The world changed completely.
So I made it; my two and three years of work set up a good outcome. So I got to surgery. And I remember talking to my doctors and my anesthetists.
Beth Gray 35:28
Uh-huh.
Bill 35:29
It was the best conversation ever. This was because they didn’t know what is this weird guy saying.
Beth Gray 35:36
Yeah, I mean, what do they know about mBraining? It doesn’t matter that you are a neurosurgeon and will open my head. What do you know about the neurology of the heart, brain, and gut-brain? And
Bill 35:53
So there’s a new anesthetist he’s going in and is trying to find a vein, and it keeps missing, keeps missing, and it keeps pricking me, and he keeps forgetting. And he’s stressing, and I told him, Look, don’t stress out, it’s all good. You’re doing a great job; you’ll find and get the vine there. And you’ll do what you have to do, and everyone will be happy. And I’ll be OK. And it doesn’t hurt me anyway, so don’t worry about it. The other people are talking to me, trying to distract me from the needle getting.
Beth Gray 36:24
exactly
Bill 36:26
all the time. And I’m saying to them, you guys are amazing. You guys are going to do a great job. Guess what? I will be the best patient you’ve ever had today. I know that you guys will be the most notable surgeons, and you guys are a great team; you know your stuff. And guess what? I know my stuff. But I’ve practiced how to be the perfect patient. So you guys have the best outcome. Right? So, I had done a hypnotherapy session before my surgery a day before about how I wanted my body to react to being pricked and cut open, how to bleed, and how to stop bleeding.
Beth Gray 37:03
Yeah.
Bill 37:05
Not to go autonomously into stress mode, to stay calm. I was doing balanced breathing for months and months before that. And also in, in the bed before surgery, I was doing balance of breathing,
Beth Gray 37:21
of course,
just getting that autonomic nervous system into that perfect place of balance,
Bill 37:27
balance, beautiful balance, and their chest. They’re checking my vitals; everything’s perfect. And they’re noticing that my heart rate is a bit low. And I have a not terrible condition, but it’s called Brady Cardio. And that means that you have a slightly lower resting heart rate. So, my resting heart rate was about 45 beats per minute.
Beth Gray 37:50
Oh, as opposed to 60 70. Right.
Bill 37:52
Yeah. They’re Wondering.
Beth Gray 37:57
So they’re a little concerned
Bill 37:57
Wondering why? And I’m going guys like, So good luck with my blood pressure was
Beth Gray 38:03
just normal. Exactly. Yeah,
Bill 38:05
My blood pressure was perfect. And sure enough, we were expecting about an eight-hour surgery. And we were done in four. Wow. Yeah. So recovery after that took a while. To come to and go out of all this stuff. And then
Beth Gray 38:25
All of that. Yeah,
Bill 38:26
yeah. And when I woke up, I was going into the I was in, I was in recovery. And my family came in, and it became emotional. And they were going to kick them out. So, I wanted not to have them kicked out. So I balanced my breath again to bring my vitals down so they wouldn’t be kicked out. Right. So, I managed to do that for quite a while. But, of course, the emotions were all over the place.
Beth Gray 38:54
Yeah,
Bill 38:55
eventually, they asked him to leave.
Beth Gray 38:58
Right.
Bill 38:58
So when I woke up, I realized that I couldn’t walk. I discovered that I couldn’t walk because I needed to go to the loo. After all, they asked me, after surgery, do you want to go to the toilet? We need to go to the bathroom and get everything moving again. I said fine. And this sweetest little short. The petite nurse said, ” I’ll help you go to the loo. Hold me. Put your arm around me. Hold me, and I’ll take you.
Well, I couldn’t feel my left side because one of the complications from surgery was that they interfered with something that meant that I had permanent numbness on my left side, which meant I didn’t know where my foot was and that it was on the ground. As soon as I got out of bed, I collapsed.
Beth Gray 39:46
Of course.
Bill 39:47
Yeah.
Beth Gray 39:48
Of course. Yeah. Because I mean, if you couldn’t feel your foot, you don’t strengthen the leg. There’s a whole lot that happens there
Bill 39:56
gone. Straight down to the ground straight after surgery. A massive scar on my head. Yeah.
Beth Gray 40:03
poor woman
Bill 40:03
Poor woman thinking, oh my god, what have I done? I’ve killed this guy.
Beth Gray 40:07
Yeah,
Bill 40:07
I screamed initially. And then I got back into bed and realized,” Oh, well, we’ll just have to do this another way.
Beth Gray 40:13
Yeah, the bedpan way.
Bill 40:14
The fun way
Beth Gray 40:19
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So.
Bill 40:20
So then what happened was I’ve taken I’ve had all the two or three days worth of reviews, and OK, we need to send you to rehab Bill.
Beth Gray 40:32
Right?
Bill 40:33
Great. Amazingly, I will go to rehab, and everything will be better. When I got to rehab, there was about a four or five-day delay between when they assessed me and when I could get onto when I could get on to my feet and be supported so that I could start learning how to walk again. What I had learned in mBraining and my many conversations with Grant and Marvin was that when you imagine yourself doing something, you are firing off the same neuronal structure.
Beth Gray 41:10
Absolutely. Yes, you have to visualize first.
Bill 41:13
Yeah, as if you were doing the thing that you wanted to do. So, of course, I started to visualize myself walking.
Beth Gray 41:21
For those four days
Bill 41:23
for those four days. So I had these heaps of visualizations, meditations that I was doing in my hospital bed, about me walking and how I was walking and how I was holding and how I was moving my foot in the whole.
Beth Gray 41:37
Absolutely Yes.
Bill 41:38
So, when I first got up, I started to understand that I had done this before. And it didn’t feel foreign, even though my legs felt strange.
Beth Gray 41:48
Yeah,
Bill 41:49
It was great. So I did that. With every aspect of my healing and recovery brin, ging the hand to the mouth and picking up a fork and all the things I needed to regain to return.
Beth Gray 42:06
Yeah,
Bill 42:08
It was a two-month state at rehab, and I was home in a month.
Beth Gray 42:18
Oh,
Bill 42:21
About a month later
Beth Gray 42:23
doing this for other people. Now, is that part of your coaching practice?
Bill 42:28
Well, I share the story so that people know what’s possible when you do this inner work, connect to your heart, and connect to your gut. It helped me get through the trauma of the two bleeds initially, my mortality,
Beth Gray 42:46
proper fear of death?
Bill 42:46
becoming a better version of myself because I struggled with it. How would my family think of me when I passed if I did die?
Beth Gray 42:59
OK, yeah,
Bill 43:00
I wasn’t happy with what they may have thought. OK, I did that to prepare for my mother-in-law’s funeral and surgery.
Beth Gray 43:12
Right?
Bill 43:13
And it was transformative. So yes, now, and even earlier on. Even after the initial surgery, I was using what I had learned to coach people to overcome challenges, trauma, and -changing experiences in their lives. So what we’re getting is we’re getting excellent outcomes for people who come in because they have a head-brained idea of what they are going to do like you and I both started, you know, in our early lives.
Beth Gray 43:49
Exactly, yeah.
Bill 43:50
And without knowing that they get this transformational work, they don’t understand the head, heart, and gut concepts. And that’s not how I sell it.
Beth Gray 43:58
No,
Bill 43:59
but they can do this. And they miss out on the time that it took you and me to connect to our hearts and our gut
right
They miss out on all of the other stuff. They go straight to the heart of the matter, which is they get coaching, and then the coaching is transformative; it brings on these neuro neuronal structures into
Beth Gray 44:19
Absolutely,
Bill 44:20
and it transformed their lives. And it happens quickly. The journey is long, but it’s still the considerable awareness that occurs quickly.
Unknown Speaker 44:30
Absolutely.
Bill 44:31
So how can people get in touch with you? Where do they find you?
Beth Gray 44:36
I know they have a page a page on Facebook; you’ve also got your website,
Bill 44:41
They can get in touch with me at RecoveryAfterStroke.com. OK,
Beth Gray 44:46
And your Facebook page is also RecoveryAfterStroke. Right?
Bill 44:49
It is, and they can also find me at Bill Gasiamis.
Oh, OK, right. Now, you’ve also got a podcast. Is that on recovery after a stroke? Or is that on Bill Gasiamis?
Yeah. It’s the recovery after stroke podcast; it can be found here on iTunes, all those places where people get that stuff.
Beth Gray 45:08
Yeah.
Bill 45:08
So yeah, people can connect with me if they want to get out of their heads. But they can also connect with me if their head is offline because of a bleed in the brain. And they don’t know how they will do the rest of their lives. We can support them in finding the fantastic brilliance of the heart and the gut intelligence and bring them to the party so that they can guide the head to get through this traumatic time.
Beth Gray 45:37
Yeah. And so, you know, it’s just using all the intelligence to support that recovery instead of trying to work your way through it with your mindset. And you know, it makes all the difference, like you say, getting to the heart of the matter.
Bill 45:55
Yeah, mindset is a great thing until your mind is offline.
Beth Gray 45:59
Right. Exactly.
Bill 46:01
And then what are you going to do?
Beth Gray 46:03
Yeah Absolutely
Bill 46:04
So the heart, you know, if people are listening, and they’ve said things like, I’m going to follow my heart or trust my gut.
Beth Gray 46:13
Yeah,
Bill 46:14
That’s what you do. When recovering from a stroke, you must follow your heart. First, you have to trust your gut. Because?
Beth Gray 46:20
Because Because this one needs this one needs time to recover. Absolutely. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’ve got to cut us short. As you know, I’ve got a five-year-old at home, and I’m starting to call Mom. It would be best if you came now. And we are well over our half hour. Thank you so much.
I mean, I could talk to you for a.
More, but yeah.
So, for those interested in knowing more about how Bill uses mBraining in recovery after a stroke, you can contact them directly. Thank you so much, Bill. I’ve appreciated having you on and getting to know you; you’re a little better. And have a great Friday.
Bill 47:04
Thank you for doing what you’re doing. I truly appreciate you and the work that you do. It’s much needed. And it’s lovely that you’ve taken this opportunity to do this. Thank you, Beth,
Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. I hope that you enjoyed it and got something out of it. If you feel that this is something you might be interested in understanding or want to learn more about, email me at recoveryafterstroke.com, and I’ll answer any of your questions. Also, if you liked this episode and think it will be helpful for others to listen to, please share it in your community. Please tell them about this episode wherever you go and communicate with other stroke survivors,
And just because I haven’t been asking, if you enjoyed this episode, please go to iTunes and leave a five-star review. It’s going to make the podcast more popular, and it’s going to allow iTunes to move it up in the rankings so other stroke survivors can find it, and hopefully, it can help them, too.
Intro 48:13
To discover how to support your recovery after a stroke, go to RecoveryAfterStroke.com.