Natasha W. Transcript

So, if you’re listening to this, you’ve probably experienced a concussion, or you know someone has had a concussion, and you can relate to the fact that it can turn your life upside down. So many people think still that a concussion is like three days you brush it off, you get on with your life. And if you’re on a persistent journey, you’re probably someone like many of the people that I work with, whose life has been turned upside down. You don’t get to be the mom you want it to be. You have to plan and pace everything. So you have the energy to make it through the week. Your career has been put on hold, your goals been paused as you focus on trying to heal yourself through this this path. I am not someone who’s had a concussion. I am a clinician who works with individuals with persistent concussion symptoms and acute concussion. And for me, it was a family member who had a brain injury. And I was young, so I was seventeen, and I didn’t understand. He experienced daily headaches, dizziness, light and sound sensitivity. He would be in the middle of a conversation with you and then he would just zone out. He wasn’t there. And then he come back a few minutes later. Short term memory issues so you could have a complete conversation and then 20 minutes later it wouldn’t be remembered that it was that it had been had at all. And as a 17 year old girl this I didn’t understand this. No one explained to him or to our family what this could be and it impacted our lives. And I kind of have to decide and moved on with with my life and the journey that that instilled. And then I became a physical therapist, and I actually became a physical therapist for a completely different reason. And I worked with individuals with stroke and spinal cord and Parkinson’s. And then, one day, an occupational therapist in town referred someone to me who was having persistent concussion symptoms. And that OTS thought process was Natasha works with the brain. And a concussion affects the brain. So let’s refer her to Natasha. And this client walked in my door and I had no idea what to do. No clue. And I shared it with this woman, whose name I will never forget. I will never forget what she looks like. I will never forget what she sounded like because she was a catalyst for me in my life. And I looked at her and I said, I have no idea what to do. But if you’re willing to work with me, I will learn and we’ll figure this out together. And she stayed– I think partially she said because there was no one else in town to help her either (Laughter) — So I was willing to go down there. But she I took a course that weekend, literally three days later I joined and enrolled in a course. And I dove down the rabbit hole with two feet and I’ve never looked back. And that was probably about seven years ago. And so today, I own a brick and mortar clinic called Symphony Brain Performance in British Columbia. And I’m honored to have people fly in from all over North America to come work with me to help them rehab their concussions. I also have an online company called Natasha Wilch Legacy Corporation and that business is all about our bigger mission evolving and my brain evolving the conversation and culture of concussions globally around the world. And we do that in a number of ways. I have a program that mentors clinicians in helping teach them how to rehab concussion. And then I have programs for individuals with concussion as well. And so I do that on a global level. And I have been blessed and honored to work with people from around the world on their journeys. And what we talked about when we first started this 30 seconds ago or two minutes ago, that feeling of loss of identity, that feeling of your well being turned upside down that feeling of confusion, because there’s so many things out there right now, but there’s really no clear path or guidance on how to move through this process. And I see these things come up over and over again. And for me, that first client that came through my door, she sparked something deep in me she was sharing challenges she was having with her family, challenges she was having a life, and it’s like it woke something back up inside of me that I had pushed down for a really long time, and I’ve been on this, like, mission, it’s evolved, but I’ve been on this mission ever since. And concussion is it it’s a hard one. I’m fully transparent with people that I have never experienced anything more than a minor concussion that has healed in a few days. And so I don’t fully understand in any way shape or form, what it feels like to live with persistent symptoms. And I don’t try to pretend that I do. But I can, I can be compassionate towards it. I also recognize that, while you live with symptoms and those symptoms in mind have root causes of why they come up. A concussion can give you the invitation to look at a deeper level of healing in yourself. Everything that we do everything that the world, everything in our world that happens. You get to decide whether it’s happened to you or whether it’s happened for you. And if something happens for you, it doesn’t mean we need to like it. It doesn’t mean even need to mean it needs to be a happy thing. But it’s happened for you to either unlock something in yourself, to look at something different, to open the door to a deeper level of healing and understanding of who you are, to potentially lead to an opportunity that you never would have thought of or carved out for yourself in your path. And so, although I haven’t had a concussion, I’ve been a family member of someone who’s had an injury and I can understand that aspect of it. But I’ve had my own journey with those really hard freaking scenarios that turn your life upside down. Those scenarios that make you wake up every morning with brain fog that make you wake up every morning that you feel like you have a pit and anxiety in your stomach that you’re gonna vomit every day. The scenarios that when a phone rings, you start to trigger with panic and you have to shake and tremor with panic attacks. That’s been me. And although those things didn’t come from a concussion, I also know those things happen or people with concussion and anytime there’s a significant event. It can disregulate our nervous system and question who we are. And so in the beginning, I was very clinical based, right, so I have a ton of training and like here’s how we rehab your vestibular system. Here’s how we rehab your visual system. Here’s how we rehab your neck. Like, very, like, Western medicine science based clinical toolbox to help can we have these systems I’m a physical therapist, that’s how I was trained. But, as I’ve gone through my own journey of deeper healing, I have absolutely been tapped into the power of reconnecting with spirituality and whatever that looks like for you. Right that can be God. That can be the universe. It can be a higher power of belief in just something else. But connecting to something that’s not necessarily this physical, tangible thing. And as I’ve been on my journey, I’ve had to embrace the elements of developing and shifting my mindset and understanding what that means and what that looks like. I’ve had to understand and identify how all the people I surround myself with impacts my own mental health and what it does to my nervous system. I’ve had to look at what are the tools and the habits and the practices that I’m doing every day. And how are those serving me to show up for my family? I have an eight year old son, right, and how are those serving me to show up for my family and benefit my healing practice? And as I went through this journey for myself, I just saw so many correlations to my concussion clients. Right? Because I could rehab their vestibular system and the vestibular system physiologically, would be showing up really well on exam. But they’re still describing symptoms to me that it wasn’t this is gonna sound terrible because I know people hate when we say this, but it wasn’t a neural like a neurological. I can find an objective finding base. And so I think it’s deeper and our body. If anyone’s ever read the Body Keeps the Score or any of these things like there’s a lot of research coming out around with somatics and how our body stores traumas. And how we know with concussion, for example, anxiety can create the exact same symptoms of a concussion. And so through my own journey and learning how to begin to accept a deeper sense of mindset and how to begin to integrate things into myself that how the deeper level of healing and help and truly, you know help me lift some of that brain fog and help you not feel like you’re gonna throw up every morning. I began to bring those practices into my concussion prac clinic. Right, so I began to talk to my clients about mindset, I began to talk to my clients about how they viewed the world, and how they viewed this event that had happened, and I challenged them to find the silver linings and the wins every single one of my clients gets what I called a wins poster. And this poster goes up and the week the rules are you put this poster up somewhere in your house, that you’re going to walk by multiple times a day and you hang a Sharpie from it. So you never have an excuse that you can’t find a pen. And anyone who’s in your house has permission to write on this poster. And what goes on this poster is a win every single day of something that you’ve done or achieved. It can be small, it can be giant, it can be whatever it is, but every day and every time you walk by that poster, you pause and you read those wins and you read those silver linings because those then fuel what else you start to see in your world. When rehabbing from a concussion, especially if we’re in a persistent place. We have the tendency to always see where we had wanted to be before our injury. And we stop and forget to look at how far we’ve come. And when we have to when I’m working with my clients, they’ll be like “but I want to be here and I want to be back to work full time and I want to do stuff,” like, I get that. And you’re on that path. But we need to pause for a second and look that you were bed bound for a year. And now look at what you’re accomplishing today. And so when we’re on this journey because it’s not fast. It does take time and rehab and work. We need to look at always remember how far we’ve come, not just where we want to be. And that’s where the wins poste –it’s just it’s a mindset piece to help us reframe how we take in these hard environments and find that silver lining and find that lesson and find that blessing. In those really hard moments. Some of my most profound elements of growth have come from the hardest situations of my life. That in that moment you feel like you’re drowning and you feel like you’re suffocating, but you get through it. And the lessons that you can go back and pull from that: it’s exponential, how much you grow in that period of time. And so when we’re all in this journey, I started pulling all of those facets from my life into the work I do with my concussion clients because it’s not just physiological. There’s so many elements and layers to this rehab journey. And I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice if we feel like we can’t, if we feel like we can separate these pieces. It all integrates together. it’s also in together as all woven together. Different elements, different percentages, different weight to the different components to different people. But I think when you’re looking holistically at a whole person, you also need to pull in these factors and make sure you take a peek at them. So, I would say my journey as a clinician over these past– however many years did I say seven years? (Laughter). My journey as a clinician started from one woman who’d been in a motorcycle accident back who was trying to get back to work– who did fully get back to work in life by the way. Started with one woman. She had really curly blonde hair, like biggest smile, who sparked something in me that has literally like fueled the rest of my career. And that career started with being purely clinical, purely physiological, purely systems based. And by both doing the deeper work of myself and listening to my clients has evolved into this space where, like I said, I’m on this global mission. And I support people in my brick and mortar from all around North America. I support people virtually in my programs. But really, really you’re doing my best to remember to see the whole person and really integrating that holistic approach because I do think where we’re coming from especially a persistent stage. That is where magic starts to happen. And that is where growth and creativity and beautiful new life paths can happen, as long as you’re open to letting it. (Smiling) That’s a bit about my story.