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This thing on your face, your nose coming into your sinuses is your body's shortcut for toxicants. Unfortunately, to go into the brain like mold, irritate the nervous system and also distort your own immune responses and hijack your gut. So, yeah, it matters a lot. And it gets so misunderstood and overlooked, even by seasoned practitioners that really care about helping you resolve your mold stuff. So we want to make sure that. That we're giving it its due. Remember that Michael and I are not coming at this hypothetically. We went through our own harrowing mold journeys. We actually both had multiple mold exposures before we ever met, just as a part of growing up, you know, and it added to our health pictures, and it definitely changed the trajectory of our health so that we were much more vulnerable to more recent exposures. And when we moved in together, unfortunately, we didn't realize this, but, you know, the bedroom was right over a moldy basement, and there was mold coming in through certain water damage leaks in the house. We just didn't know to think about that. And the confluence of that, plus putting the WI FI router under our bed, because it was a very small house and it had to be in the bedroom or so we thought. WI fi routers were, like, brand new at the time. And I remember thinking, oh, I don't want to disrupt our sleep with the blinky, flashy lights that. That come off of the router. I know. I'll protect our sleep by putting it under the bed. Well, that is a horrible idea, because EMFs are very intrusive to your sleep. There's so much study about this now, so much research. There's a confluence here of multiple stressors on the body. So mold is going to impact you more directly and for longer. If there are other stressors, other disruptors to your body's own healing responses, you will be more susceptible to the mold. And that just makes sense when you think about it, right? It's not like EMFs are alive. Mold is a colonizer and has a live consciousness and is trying to fight back. And it is aware that EMFs are coming in and are disrupting your body's own immune responses and also encouraging a dumping of histamine at higher levels. Some studies show that it can even be a 10x increase in histamine in certain conditions with just normal EMF exposure. What is emf? If you don't already know what that word is, emf. There's a few different kinds of electrical stress that come off of, you know, our WI FI routers. Our phones, the wiring in our walls, just different types of electrical disruption. Most people, when they say the word emf, they're referring to rf, which is coming off of our smart devices. The problem is when you add in that kind of multiple, that stressor on top of a mold exposure, then you get a compounding factor where immune distress actually gets much larger. Some support is the name that Michael and I gave our basket of tools that we see really helping you to shift your nervous system in real time, even when you're stressed. Let's do it together right now so we can practice. It'll put you in a nice learning mode because mold is naturally an overwhelming topic and we get to decide how much we let it stress us out. I want you to have the information to arm yourselves and make great decisions for yourself. You're in a much better position to do that when you know how to regulate your own nervous system. And let's do them all together right now. So we're going to stimulate these acupressure points up here on the forehead. We actually take all these fingers and line them up in a nice even line across the forehead about midway up. And if you're like me, you may have seen somebody in your life do this. My dad did this a lot when he was stressed out. When I was little, I remember seeing him at the kitchen table going like this. And I would be like, oh, dad's stressed, he's, he's having a hard time. And I would just know instantly. But what I didn't realize was he was instinctively trying to self regulate and trying to re stimulate the prefrontal cortex, send blood flow back to the front of the brain. Better decision making. Less blood flow to the, the fear centers, more blood flow to the decision making centers. Isn't that interesting? And we find studies show that this is actually a really great way to self regulate. So all we have to do, if you're like me, you might have a surface in front of you. You can rest your elbows on it and rest your forehead on it. It's really not complicated and it's free. If not, you can still, you know, let your elbows, your fore, your arms rest against your chest and round over. If you don't have a surface in front of you, notice how you are naturally drawn to take a deeper breath when you're in this position. You might soften your belly, soften your eyes, soften your jaw, soften your tongue. You just go ahead and let your tongue float up to the roof of your mouth like a magnet sucked Back up to the top so that you have a nice connection point there. That's going to support vagus nerve regulation. It's going to support parasympathetic dominance. It's going to support a deeper diaphragmatic breath. And of course, you already know that sinuses are use it or lose it. We want to encourage a nice nasal breath in and out. If you can notice that while you're in this position, your body wants to naturally slow down your breathing. And you may become aware that your breathing was rather on the shallow or the rapid side. And maybe we've been spending too much time in a shallow, rapid breathing rhythm that's normal or that's common, not normal when we don't feel well to actually have this paradoxical breathing is what it's called. Or we're not sending breath down, down, down deeper into the body the way we want to when we're in a healing, accidentally get caught in a stress breathing, which is too shallow, too high in the breathing cavity. So while we sit here together for just a couple more breaths, I want you to be really intentional. Stretch your diaphragm downward as you inhale and exhale completely out to allow your diaphragm come all the way back up. Draw your navel to the back of your spine right there. In, in, in. Exhale, exhale, exhale. So the next breath feels nice and fresh. Inhaling, all together. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Exhale. 1, 2, 3, four, five. Slower now. 1, 2, 3, Four, five. Exhale. One, two, three, four, five. Last one. Inhale. One, two, Three, four, five. Exhale. 1, two, three, four, Five. And take all the time you need right here to take inventory of your body. Send a little fresh oxygen and love to the part of your body that's asking for it the most with the next inhale. And just notice the shifts that have already happened with that first soma support. And now we'll go into our next soma support stack together. Now we're going to go into our sinus opening points. Remember how the sinuses are formed, right? So this is just giving you this visual one more time. You actually have four pairs of sinuses. Maxillary in the cheeks, sphenoid up here in the corners of the eyes, deep between the nose and eyes, ethmoid between the eyes a little higher up and the frontal, which is up and above the brows. We can encourage deeper sinus opening just very gently. And yes, there are core acupuncture points that we're also stimulating in this process. Gonna gently use Two fingers, find the corners of the nose of your mouth, the nose of your mouth, the corners of your nose right here, where if you smile, that's would be where your cheeks would lift. We're gonna gently draw upward in little outward circles. I know it looks crazy, but so good for you. And invite your body to breathe through the sinuses while you do this. Process us. Don't push too hard. This is delicate tissue. In and up. Hit 10 nice circles, inviting a deeper breathing in. This gives you. Brings your attention neurologically all the way to this site that we'd stop paying attention to right when we need it the most, which is kind of weird when you think about it. We're going to move our fingers up midway up the bridge. So we're still using pressure from this pointer finger. And then up here. So lift the cheeks open upwards. Nice nasal breathing. Become aware of the shape of your breath. Notice what you notice. Gentle pressure upwards and outwards. And then moving up, we're going to go into the corners of the eyes. Ten gentle upwards four circles. And one of these points might hit stronger than another. You might feel more tenderness in a certain spot, might feel really welcome, or might feel like, ooh, I didn't know it was going to be that tender right there. And then we'll end with some nice circles up at the top here. Now, are we directly touching the sinus points up here? No, we're not. They're deeper in the tissues. But what we're doing is stimulating blood flow and neurons. We're telling the body, hey, all these delicate lymphatics in here, let's move these, let's open them up. You can even finish with a bonus little lymphatic massage. Hook your thumbs under the chin, under the jawline, gently work your way out and down. You can palpate down either side of the neck, looking under and down and ending with some nice opening points up. Everything drain. Just palpate on either side of your collarbones, at the base of your neck, and then under the collarbones. You can give yourself a little extra love just to support lymphatic drainage. Now, down here, I actually encourage you to palpate rather, you know, with some more pressure than you would appear in these delicate sinus tissues. Because we actually want to open up the fascia and get to the deeper lymph. This isn't just about delicately, you know, encouraging surface lymph to move. We actually want to open up these points because the fascia has lots of reasons to constrict in the chest. In this Day and age, because of the way we round over, you know, we're rounding over our tech, our phones, our laptops. You might be a side sleeper too. We hunch and contract when we're under stress. So we want to open up the breathing cavity, you know, for the sinuses, for the lymphatics, for the lungs, work the diaphragm. We need to have oxygen to help combat mold. What we just demonstrated in real time is what we want to be doing on a daily basis for ourselves as we work our mold recovery journey. This is not hypothetical. This is not lip service that we're just giving to the nervous system. The point is to enroll the nervous system as the CEO of your own healing. If it doesn't feel safe, it's not going to encourage you to detox and drain. And those are really important mechanisms. It's not going to let you to digest, to absorb your nutrients. It's going to downregulate repair as well. It's going to instead send resources to the systems of the body that help you stay alert and arise to meet a temporary stressor. But mold is an ongoing stressor if you're living in it. Certainly it's an ongoing poisoning. But even after you've left a moldy environment, if you still have mold in your body, that is continuing to be an ongoing stressor. So we have to enroll the nervous system in our own healing responses in our detox journey, so that we're upregulating detox once more. Because your nervous system's job is to constantly ask, am I safe right now? And if the answer is no, because you have, you're breathing in mold spores, you have mycotoxins running through your blood and in your brain and in your liver, and your liver's trying to get kick them out for you, then of course, your nervous system is going to be getting signals from inside the body, hey, we are not safe. And it's gonna lead to slower detox, drainage and repair and more and more stress over time. That's why the mold recovery journey is so naturally, like, by default, overwhelming and stressful. Because right when you need your nervous system to be regulated the most, it's actually getting poisoned physically by the mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are directly harming to the nerves, to your vagus nerve, to the brain, to. To the myelin sheath. There's so many mechanisms of damage that mold creates for you. So we want to just acknowledge that, okay, that's where we're starting. But it doesn't mean where we're stopping. As long as soon as we acknowledge it, we can actually fix it. That's the good news. If mold has already dysregulated your vagus nerve, and if it's pushed you into chronic fight or flight, if it's flooded your brain with stress signals, if it's scrambled your stress response system, now it makes sense that you've been trying to detox while your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. That's no bueno. You're not gonna have enough room to do it then. That's why it hasn't been working. That's why once we acknowledge it, we can actually start to upregulate, rest, digest, detox and repair mode again. That's where detox actually happens. So sympathetic mode, which is fight or flight, is on one end of the nervous system expression spectrum. For the autonomic nervous system, it's blood flow moving to the muscles and to the heart for survival. And blood flow is moving away from liver, kidneys, and digestive system detox. Organs don't get resources, they need energy. Goes to survival, not repair. And then on the other end of that spectrum, if you spend too much time in fight or flight, you actually boomerang down to the other end and go into dorsal vagal collapse, which is that freeze state. So you might be moving through your checklist of things you have to do to survive, but you're dissociated. And so even when you do get downtime, you don't feel relaxed, you're not able to rest, you're doom scrolling or you're zoning out, you're dissociated, and you just can't shake that stress feeling. But you feel frozen. So what instead we want to do is find our way back to the center, find our way back to regulation for the autonomic nervous system. So we can do that with those sinus opening points, with positive points, indeed, with any soma support or vagus nerve stimulation. I think a lot of the vagus nerve stimulation stuff out there is kind of annoying to somebody that's already in a stressed out mode. Like, okay, so the research shows that if you gag, you're stimulating your vagus nerve. Who wants to gag? Nobody. Who wants to gargle? Nobody. Who wants to get into an ice bath? Absolutely no one. There's easier, gentle ways to do this, and you just learned two of them. So I invite you to use them as early and as often as possible. And you, upon waking, before supplements, before eating, on the way to bed, and of course, before or after any stressor, you are welcome to use them anytime. And the good news is, the more you use them, the stronger they work. Because getting into parasympathetic mode is almost like a muscle that the nervous system has to work. It's like going to the gym. So the more you use your soma support, the faster you get into parasympathetic dominance, the easier it is for your body to remember. Oh, yeah, that's a groove I know how to do. I know how to get back to the parasympathetic. I know how to calm down. I know how to rest. I know how to open up my breathing and change my breathing patterns. I'm okay, you know, yes, there's stress going on in the world right now, but here in my body right now, I know how to get safe so that I can upregulate my own repair mechanisms. And that's when you get the good stuff. The blood flow to the detox organs. The liver is allowed to upregulate all the resources it needs to actually process toxins. Kidneys can eliminate waste. The digestive system can work. You can get that gut motility going again. You're allowed to send resources there. And yes, that helps to move the toxins out as well, of course. So this is where the good stuff happens, where the magic actually occurs. So when mold locked you into sympathetic mode and wasted all your resources on stress, and then you boomerang down to freeze, that's, you know, collapse state. It's just a bad habit, that's all. It's. It makes total sense. The body doesn't make mistakes. It was responding to being poisoned. So your body's not broken. You're not dumb. It's not about, like, genes. The genetic expression conversation is so frustrating to me because even gene experts that are making all their money selling you DNA tests and DNA supplements, the studies all show this is about genetic expression is about 5 to 10% of your health outcome at best. Well, what about the other 90 to 95%? That's the stuff you have control over. That's the nervous system regulation. That's the food choices that can be important so we don't poke the bruise that we're trying to heal. That's the sinus support, that's the detox support in the right order for you, at the right pace for you. And it really all starts with the nervous system, moment by moment, choosing to get back into regulation. Even when life doesn't really give us, like a great easy time of it. I would love it if life would just hit pause for us while we did the healing. Um, but I've never met a single person where that was possible. So we're gonna have to create those conditions ourselves. The safety and the upregulation. I also wanna underscore this part. I want you to remember why it feels so overwhelming to learn about mold, to tackle mold, to detox mold. There's a very real robbing of your body, of your, the ATP you need from mold. So mold is very good at damaging your mitochondria, which are your tiny little energy factories right in the cells. Right. Your mitochondria's job are to turn the nutrients that arrive at your cells, that are delivered there into an energy currency that you can use to do work. And that's your ATP. And mold directly harms and damages the mitochondria and tells them to stop doing that. They're not able to reproduce as fast, they're not able to make ATP as fast. And they spend their own resources on signaling that there's danger to the rest of the body to try to get more resources to come to that specific cell. But if the whole body's doing that, then you're just wearing yourself out, str. Stressing out. And not enough work is getting done on the inside. So we fall behind, we fall behind on repair, we fall behind on dealing with oxidative stress. That's why you might breathe in mold and those mold spores hit your sinuses and your lungs. But actually they're very tiny and they come into the bloodstream with ease. They love colonizing in your, in your sinuses and lungs. Don't get me wrong. But as they excrete mycotoxins that are very tiny and distribute naturally throughout the bloodstream, entering in and out of cells with eas, crossing the blood brain barrier with ease. You're getting signals body wide that you are not safe. So of course we want to tackle sinus specific options. We want to support the lungs, we want to support your liver to flush all this stuff out. But we got to acknowledge this is a body wide energy crisis. When we've been exposed to mold. I was getting told I was going to get put in a wheelchair. I was told it was my lyme and the co infections. I was told I might have Ms. Um, I was diagnosed with a lot of weird stuff. Um, you know, of course, rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, things like that. But the truth is my body didn't have enough energy to flush out the poison. And you can apply labels to that all you want. Pathogens are going to absolutely take advantage of that situation, because pathogens, including Lyme and co infections, love a stagnant, stressed out, depleted body. Like, perfect, I'm gonna move right in. I'm gonna set up shop. They're just opportunists, that's all. If we spent all of our time, you know, chasing diagnoses instead of fleshing out the things that caused the terrain issues in the first place, then it's gonna be a really hard road for us. So by spending as much of our resources, time, and energy on the mold as possible, if indeed you have been exposed to mold and this is a part of your health picture, then everything else gets easier to work on because you can finally get your energy back. That's what the energy crisis is, right? When you need the energy the most, you have the least amount of it because of the mold, because it's shutting down your energy production. The great news is it's fixable and you actually still get to relax your way into healing. You're not going to force your way into healing. That's why we address the nervous system first. So we get out of the fight or flight and back into rest and digest. Detox without nervous system support is like trying to work with one hand tied behind your back. It's pretty hard. Or trying to swim with one hand behind your back. You know, good luck to you. Then. We're gonna get into this situation of reabsorption of toxins, right? The fight or flight mode shuts down bile flow and lymphatic drainage both. So the toxins that you try to mobilize with detox just recirculate and get reabsorbed. Herx reactions can become traumatic. Anybody hurczed here before? I was such a crasher, I was like a number one. Ed Ed. Herxing. Without nervous system regulation die off, reactions can overwhelm you, creating more trauma and shutting you down further. And that inflammation increases. Mobilizing toxins without proper drainage creates more inflammation, especially in your brain. And mast cells end up going haywire. Remember when we talked about mast cells yesterday? This is a really important piece for people that have sinus issues. For people that have mold exposures, this is a really important point for you to understand. Detox reactions can trigger massive mast cell degranulation, worsening histamine and inflammatory responses. And your body's not making a mistake. It's responding to the poison, and it's wanting to let you know, hey, we've been poisoned. There's poison here. We gotta get outta here. But if you're talking about your home or your workplace and it's not easy for you to leave, or your body is responding to mold that you have already been exposed to and it's still in your body, and it's not a current incoming exposure, you. There's no away from. There's no break from it. So your body's not making a mistake, but you are using the little energy that you have on this massive inflammatory response that can be avoided. The last point I'll make about this is the how the drainage pathways can slow down or, you know, constrict. Chronic sympathetic activation constricts bile ducts, so. And lymphatic vessels. So it's harder. It's physically harder for you to eliminate toxins, even when you've done the work to mobilize them. The bottom line is aggressive detox without nervous system support creates unnecessary suffering. So we think about this in terms of what is the order of operations here. The order of operations is nervous system support and acknowledging the different ways that mold can harm you so that you make intelligent choices about what your detox should be. Mold exposes you through three main pathways. The first one, and why we're talking about sinuses again today, is the inhalation route. The mold spores float in the air. They're microscopic and invisible, and you breathe them in with every breath. This is what happens. So even if you're not currently living in mold, yes, your college dorm room counts. You know, yes, your first apartment with the leaky faucet, and you didn't notice it until you moved out. Oops. And then as you're cleaning out underneath the bathroom counter, there's, like, black stuff down there. Oh, okay. Well, hopefully the landlord will deal with it. Yuck. I'm getting out of here. All that counts. It added up. Your childhood basement flooding, you know, all that counts and adds up. So that finally, when you reach a point in your life where you have enough stress or yet another mold exposure, the bill comes due. The bill finally comes due. So the initial symptoms look like nasal congestion and sinus infections, wheezing and shortness of breath, persistent coughing, chest tightness, respiratory problems. And of course, this is really easy to take in in this day and age, because there's no age of building that is safe from mold. All different ages of buildings have their own vulnerabilities to mold. The way we make houses today actually invites mold problems if there's any kind of water in the wrong place. For any length of time. If you miss one little spot of ceiling or caulking on a window as you in new construction, you can have a problem if you accidentally screw a drywall screw into that plastic water pipe running behind the wall. Cause you weren't paying attention. Congratulations. You just created a silent invisible mold issue over time. There's so many reasons for new construction actually to be even worse than old buildings that have a history and foundation issues and attic issues and crawl space stuff. This is something to be aware of, because as you inhale, think about what happens. You have this colonization risk. That's when mold takes up residence. That acute exposure and colonization. And how colonization happens is your sinuses and respiratory tracts are warm and moist. That's a perfect environment for mold. Right? The perfect environment for mold. But it also allows you to let mold set up shop in the long term. It's not just about, oh, I landed in a soft spot and I'm going to release some poison in my natural life cycle and then I'll be gone. And not a year because the body's going to flush me out. No, they're coming in and setting up shop for the long term. So remember also that we're not going to spend a ton of time on mold ingestion. Um, but we do a lot of that in the mold reset bundle in the mold detox jumpstart course. Because we are getting more and more exposed, exposed to moldy foods because of the way that our food supply chain works. So if you have a little bit of environmental mold and you've got a little bit of food molds, now you have competing mold strains in the body. This is really important to understand, so it makes sense why we'd be more reactive now than we were in the past to just, oh, it's just a little bit of mold in the house. Geez. And I cleaned it up. No, ma'. Am. It's a lot more complex than that now because we are getting exposed to multiple strains on an ongoing basis. The way we grow our food and the way we store it and the way we process it. I always think of this one sweet woman in the healing labs. She was so lovely and so smart and like, really highly intelligent. Like, oh, such a dynamo. But she was feeling so terrible. And she was down to just three foods. And one of those foods was organic applesauce. She could barely tolerate anything else. She had unlovable digestive symptoms. Just exhausted all the time. Gerd, nausea. Gerd, is that acid reflux on steroids? You know, really Difficult bowel issues, like too stressed out to leave the house. Worked from home, but could barely work anymore. Just kind of a shell of herself. And one of the foods that she was eating was organic applesauce. She was like, I only eat organic. I only eat simple foods. No preservatives, no toxins, no nothing. Why am I not healing faster? When you looked at one of her strains, it was patulin, which is very common in apple products. And what you don't realize and don't think through is what. What kind of apples do you think are getting put into applesauce? Are they the prettiest ones, the freshest ones? No, they are the ones that are bruised, the ones that are old, and yes, the ones that are moldy. And there's nothing to stop manufacturers from doing that. And it's still legal them organic. And do they even realize what they're doing? Are they mold informed? No, they're not. They're still providing an organic product. They're probably even proud of that product. What they don't realize is how devastating that is to somebody who has also lived in mold for a period of time. The confluence of factors becomes too much for the body. So yes, we are inhaling it, but we are also ingesting it. And sometimes we're getting it through contact. Like I got what we thought was a staph infection back in the day during a move, because I pulled my stuff out of storage, my boxes, back in my 20s, you know, moving into a new place, and I suddenly was covered with these crazy scary rashes. The emergency room, you know, couldn't figure it out. And years later, as I look back, I think, oh, it's probably those storage boxes. Cuz I knew as I was touching the cardboard boxes that I was flaring literally on contact. I could tell it was from all the places on my body that had touched the boxes. Um, so it's just something to remember that we're also absorbing these through the, through the skin. They're very good at that. So it puts even more pressure on the body once we actually do inhale. Because there's so many ways for the body to get stressed out. We think about histamine as a histamine bucket. Just like your total toxin load, you know, in the body, it's like a bucket overflowing. And whenever it overflows, it creates symptoms. Remember, histamine is not bad. Histamine is actually amazing. Histamine is a wonderful way to help your body stay alive and do basic processes to keep you alive. But Too much histamine in the body creates inflammation, and mold exposure absolutely triggers a cascade of that. It creates immune system overwhelm where mycotoxins suppress and dysregulate immune function, creates gut damage and destroys that beneficial bacteria and damages the intestinal lining itself. And yes, it can happen from inhaling mold or ingesting mold on food enzyme suppression like dao, That's a big deal. Dao is your histamine clearing enzyme. So if you're eating moldy food and it's harming your digestive tract, or you're inhaling mold through your sinuses and then swallowing little bits of that, um, mold colonization and the biofilms that set up shop in those delicate sinuses all day long, that post nasal drip, not only are you allowing fungus to grow in your gut and create an environment where pathogens thrive, but you're actively damaging your gut lining, where you're supposed to be protecting healthy mast cell function. And you're also be supposed to be creating the enzyme D A L. What does that mean? Means that histamine releases faster from mast cells and degrades slower because you don't have enough dao. So it's impossible to really think about mold and take care of it well and flush it out of the body for good without seeing the sinus, the sinuses, the gut, the immune system, and the nervous system together as a whole and understand how they're supposed to work and what has gone wrong. Before you try to shove all this out through your liver, can you see why other detoxes haven't worked? It's like, well, duh, there's a really complex environment here right now. That's okay. We have histamine overload. That's fine. Yes, we're more reactive than we used to be. That's okay. This is the connection most practitioners must. But it's not too late. We just want to understand how the mast cells are working. They're just stuck in the alarm position for really, really good reasons. So if you have irritation or inflammation in your sinuses, in your lungs, even in your gut and digestive tract, in your brain or your nervous system, even in the bladder itself. Basically, anywhere your body meets the outside world and is trying to touch the outside world or flush out what has come in from the outside world, that's where the mast cells live. So if you have irritation or inflammation in any of these areas, I want you paying extra special attention and see how it's a much bigger story than just the sinuses because you have External to the body, which is your skin. And then you have the, the tube of your digestive tract which actually starts in your sinuses. And then the excretionary pathways out through the urine, out through the bowels. So anywhere along that lining, internally or externally, is where your mast cells are meeting. The world is where your mast cells are meeting mold. And that's where your body is deciding how much, how fast to release histamine. And we don't want to, you know, just suppress histamine with a medication because it actually dulls your receptors and creates longer term dysregulation can actually lead to more sensitivity over time. Which I know is a bummer because all some relief right now. I totally get it. But if we actually help the body to regulate itself in the right order, then ultimately for you it's way less work, less sensitivity, more resilience, more energy. So we gotta support these little guys and not make them wrong for doing their job. Their job is to scan for incoming threats and signals. So of course there's a ton of em in the sinuses. So of course they're supposed to scan for incoming threats and signals. Of course, of course they're supposed to give you instant brain fog and anxiety in a multi building. Like, hello, we're getting poisoned. We gotta get outta here. Hey, I don't like it in here. I thought when I was walking into my office every morning when I had a mold issue in there that I just didn't like my job. Cause I would get like instant stress, instant overwhelm. Like I would feel instantly, like emotionally upset as I sat down at my desk like, man, I gotta get outta this job. I don't like it here. Um, it was the mold I was walking into poison. My body was trying to tell me, you should not be here. And with every fiber of my being, I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. And yeah, some of that is about needing to update my life path. Some of it was about just being poisoned in that space. So we want to pay attention and start learning what these signals mean. So when we're dysregulated by mold, your mast cells treat everything as a threat and they just can't stop. They can't turn off, they can't take a break. There's no off button when mold is in the building. Literally in your body is what I mean. So we talked about this a little bit already. How mold activates the mast cells, cause you suppress the immune function, mycotoxins bind to mast cell receptors and certain Mycotoxins directly attach to receptors on the mast cells. That's what makes them harsher than others. That's why not all mycotoxins are the same. They actually hit different parts of the body differently. Nature is so smart. Mold is so smart. Every one of them has their own little jobs to do out in nature. We just removed ourselves from nature, so we don't have all of the factors we need to keep mold in check the way we do out in nature. We don't have the sunlight, the fresh air. We don't have the balancing microorganisms because we're inside, in an artificial environment, so we don't get the balance we need. And our environment is ever more artificial, so we get less and less of those balancing factors. So when this happens in the body, it's just one side of a. Of a coin. It triggers degranulation, so the mast cells explode, releasing their contents. Histamine, inflammatory cytokines, prostaglandins, and, yes, leukotrines. So it creates this chronic activation, not just occasional flares, but also that constant ongoing background noise of activation. Just like stress, stress, stress, stress. I'm reactive. I'm reactive. It's a weird little chant that goes on in the background, isn't it? Just like not being able to rest, repair, soften, have fun, be joyful. Not enough stamina to just do the things you actually want to do. This is why. So your body's actually not making a mistake because it's trying to defend against toxins, but it doesn't have enough of the basic supports from you that it needs to finish the job, because it's trying to do it against this backdrop of other stressors. Is this helpful to anybody to see this? So what happens in both the sinuses and in the gut lining is that your mucosal barrier actually breaks down. So that's where we see your tight junctions fail. And actually, the tissues are very similar between the sinuses and the gut. The enterocytes are actually damaged, and we lose that protective mucus layer. So why do you think your body's trying to make extra mucus right now? It's trying to repair and create this drainage material so it can flush out some of the junk, the mycotoxins, the spores themselves. It's trying to flush out some of the biofilms that it can see and try to reestablish a protective layer. It's not an accident. It's the body's own healing response. It's just not in a position to finish the job, it needs your help. So once we see that and once we realize, oh, we don't have enough DAO on hand, we don't have enough MAO on hand, the enzymes that are supposed to decrease actually process histamine. For us, that means that we have higher histamine in the body, higher reactivity because of the mold and the mycotoxins. And it just creates more and more inflammation, which makes us trickier and trickier to unpack. It doesn't mean it's too late. That's the good news. I also want to make the point of mold. As neurotoxins, your brain actually rewires a little bit on mold. So you haven't, you're not broken, you're just exposed. And that's why I want to make sure that you're really giving yourself grace and understanding this piece. Mycotoxins easily cross the blood brain barrier and they access your brain instantly. They're lipophilic, which means they're fat loving. And your brain is very fat dense, isn't it? That's what most of your brain tissue is made out of. So this allows your, the mycotoxins not just to cross the blood brain barrier because they're so small, they do that with ease. But also they hang out in the brain because they're naturally attracted to fat. So they're getting there through the blood, the, through the bloodstream itself, through the olfactory pathways. Your sinuses are a shortcut to your nervous system, to the brain itself. Your olfactory nerve is literally just a couple of inches long. And mycotoxins pass up and through that, no problem. It's like a little highway for poison straight from your sinuses into your brain. Now, your brain doesn't have pain receptors. Isn't that interesting? It blew my mind when I learned that way back in the day, brain doesn't have pain receptors. So how does it tell you that it's inflamed? It tells you that it's inflamed. Through brain fog, through anxiety, right through the not being able to access your, your short term and long term memories easily, through slowing down of your words. The mold trail off is so common. I always think mold when I have a new client standing in front of me and they don't finish their sentences. It's like, yeah. And so, and then it was like, there's a delay. Because your brain is so inflamed, it's really internally. It feels like brain on fire. But on the outside, what you're aware of is like just this fogginess, like I can't get to problem solving. I don't feel creative anymore. I don't have my sense of humor anymore. And that's because of these. The how easy it is for mold to access the brain and to set up shop straight through the sinuses. It's like this perfect little highway. It's not great, right? But as soon as we acknowledge it, then we understand, oh, I'm not broken. All of these mold driven symptoms are reversible. That's the part I want you to get excited about. That's not, this isn't who you are now. This is just what has happened. That's it. Your body's just having a very logical response to being poisoned. It's experiencing neurotoxicity, right? Because mold damages the actual brain cells, that's okay. You can make new ones. Your brain is highly plastic. Neuroplasticity is a very real thing. So don't worry about losing some brain cells along the way. You can get them back. But it does affect you, particularly in areas tied to mood, to memory, and yes, to sleep. Neuroinflammation. That's that brain on fire that we were talking about, where the immune system is flooding the brain with those inflammatory cytokines. So it's not just your joints, it's not just your skin, it's not just your gut, it's not just your sinuses. If you feel inflammation anywhere else that's driven by mold, guarantee that your brain is experiencing the same thing. It just expresses it in a different way for you. And then, yes, we experience that oxidative stress because mold produces free radicals, depletes your glutathione and your antioxidant defenses and clogs those neurons with waste. So then we get that neurotransmitter disruption. Your mold is actually directly interrupting your body's ability to make serotonin and to use it. Serotonin is like your reason to feel good. Like, it's the good stuff. It's the joy in life. It's also interfering with your ability to make and use dopamine. Yes, it's your reward signal, but it also is the motivation and the decision making capabilities that you must have in order to love your life. And it also interferes with gaba, which is our very favorite because it's all about calming down, rest, support, healing, feeling safe, you know, and it actually interferes with oxytocin too. So your ability to connect with others and that kind of relational safety. So basically, all the good stuff in life we are getting robbed of. Not because we're not smart people, not because it's too late, not because your temperament sucks or you've become a weird person over time. That's what I thought. Like, what happened to me? I used to, you know, feel pretty good about myself. I wasn't great, but, you know, I. I knew what I wanted. I knew how to connect with people. I thought of myself as a generous person, a kind person. I had a sense of humor. Where did all that go? That's gone. And it's really all about the mold, guys. So you can get yourself back. That's the good news. We just want to make sure that we understand what has gone wrong so that we actually respect that process. Because when you pair that with mold and respiratory distress, mold and sinus distress, mold and digestive distress, mold and liver distress, and yes, mold and hormones as well, this is a really big inflammatory cascade, and no wonder it feels overwhelming. So let's go back to our mold map right now in the order in which we actually want to address this in. So we want to drain first, detox second. Remember, now you know, and you can never unsee this. Um, nervous system regulation is a critical part of this. That's why it's a number one on this list. Nervous system. We want to encourage it every day throughout the day to get out of fight or flight to detox. Now, here's a question. If you've been paying attention, you know the answer. Should you do all the nervous system healing first and then detox? Should you spend months and months on nervous system healing and then start your detox? No, that's not gonna work. Because your nervous system is constantly getting signals from the poison in your body, like mold and mycotoxins. I'm not safe. So we have to work on both of them at the same time. We just fold in the nervous system stuff immediately, and then we ease in to the detox and drainage and repair stuff. Makes sense, but they have to happen at the same time. They are two sides of the same coin. So nervous system regulation, drainage pathway support, mitochondrial repair. My favor it getting your energy back. So good, life becomes easier again. Now, remember, if you paid attention to the training on day one, we talked all about why we can't just throw a bunch of glutathione at this, right? Because we don't want to upregulate one aspect of detox too fast or mobilize too fast. This is about supporting the body to get into rest. Iex detox detox repair mode. Then we support our drainage pathways to widen a little bit and smooth things out. Then we speed things up, and we add in binders and we add in mobilization. Really dead last. Do we add on anything that would speed up this process? So that's really critical. Here's another view of it. The mold matrix itself. It's easy once you know how the system works. So that's the beginning. We assess, we make the decision what's right for you, what are the exposures we're working with. And then, of course, we go right into stabilizing, support the nervous system. Stabilize those mast cells, give them some love, won't you? They're just your alarm cells. They're just stuck in the on position. But that doesn't mean they're making a mistake. So we don't wanna make them wrong for it. And our story for about ourselves can't be, oh, my gosh, I'm so reactive. Oh, my gosh, I will never get well, because that's just more alarms setting off. We're gonna relax our way into healing, not force it, Gonna ease our way in. Learn to avoid certain triggers so we're not poking the bruise and that we're trying to heal. That makes sense, right? That's what stability is all about. And, yeah, a big part of that is supporting energy production, because a big reason why your detoxes have failed in the past. You did not have enough energy in the system to do the work that you were asking your body to do. Your body's not stupid. It absolutely knows the mold is there. It wants to get it out, but it's not in a position to without some of these foundationals. So by telling it, hey, you should add to your to do list right now, even though you're inflamed, depleted, and super reactive, it doesn't go well, does it? It's a frustrating experience. It's unnecessarily frustrating. It doesn't mean we don't have ups and downs in the healing journey. Of course we do. There's gonna be good days and bad days. And is this project going to, you know, resolve as fast as you want it to? No. If we were all being honest, we'd say, I'll give this a long weekend, and then I want to be done. That's not how it works with mold. But you and I both know that we're all adults here. This is going to be something that you ease into and chip away at and finally flush it out for good. But it is just that it is just a project and it has an endpoint. Everybody's pace is different. So I'm not going to make you promises about is it 10 days, is it 30 days, is it six weeks, is it six months? It could be any or all of the above. It's more likely going to be longer than you want it to be. That's okay though, because you're going to do it in the right order. You are now more informed than you ever have been before. For you can be more discerning, more loving to your body. And a magical thing happens when you, when you give your body grace around this. You have more stamina for the work. It's not so frustrating. It's like, okay, I'm just doing what I can today. You know, I'm. Maybe it's not all the whole list that I wanted to get to, but that's okay. And then we can get into encouraging drainage. Once we establish some stability, then we can upregulate liver and kidney support and flush out those bowels and flush, flush out the sinuses with those rinses and the formulas for nebulizing that. Flush out the biofilms and all the junky colonized stuff. You'd be amazed what you can see in our forum. These big long parasites coming out of people's noses. It's creepy, I know, but that's because mold created the perfect environment for parasites to thrive. So yeah, we'd have to do a little bit of clean out work. But we do that once we get some stability. Gentle liver and lymph flow, lymphatic system support, support supporting detox with binders and bile builders deep in the detox mode, breaking up stagnation like the junky cholesterol bile stones that can form in our liver and bile ducts. Right? And then we can get into the deeper work of addressing other root causes if there are any heavy metals, chemicals, parasites. You know, this is an easy way to think about the mold matrix and just ease in. I want you to have access to this information immediately and take your health into your own hands. I want you to change your story about yourself. This is so important. You are not too reactive to heal. I thought that for years I had such unlivable depression and stress and I felt left behind by life. I felt left for dead by God. As a very spiritual person, that's a deep, deep, deep wound. But it wasn't me, it wasn't my body, it certainly wasn't God. I was getting shown all the right resources to. I was just too brain foggy to notice. It was all being lit up on a path for me to heal myself. And once I finally relaxed into that and took responsibility for my own healing, instead of expecting a white coat to fix me, everything started to change. And that's what I want for you, too. I want you to feel empowered out of this. I want you to feel brave. You are not too reactive to heal. You're not too brain foggy to heal. And nobody can fix this for you but you. Even as teaching the next crop of practitioners how to be more mold savvy, they're still going to go out there and teach people how to heal themselves. That's what the ultimate result is going to be. So I want this for you so much to not have to keep suffering past this point, have a new story about yourself after this week. You just remember your body's having a very logical response to the stresses it's been put under. And it doesn't make mistakes. Symptoms are just messengers. They are not failures. Your body's trying to tell you you've been poisoned. That's all. And it makes total sense. Can you give more into the mold and EMF sensitivity? Lincoln, what is going on there? Thanks. Oh, I know I never should have talked about that today because it's a huge, huge bag of worms, isn't it? Think about it this way. Your EMF exposure, what the studies now show is that EMF exposure is really good at distorting our immune responses, actually in a very similar fashion to mold. So it creates this upregulation of the reaction responses where we're releasing inflammatory cytokines and interleukins and histamine as well into the body faster than we would otherwise. So it's a compounding effect. With mold, you're going to be more sensitive to mold now than before. We brought our cell phone towers into our homes. Many cell phone towers. That's what a WI fi router is. So that's why in. In. In my view, that's one of the biggest reasons why mold is such a bigger deal now than it used to be. Because it would be fine if we could handle just some of that, some of the time, you know, some exposure, some of the time, as long as our body can keep up with detox, digestion, and repair. But that's the simplest way to think about it. There are so many other inflammatory factors that come along with EMFs that compound mold's instincts and the ways that mold damages the body. But so they actually just kind of conflate each other and it's just a much bigger cumulative burden to the body. It's really interesting, isn't it? Can you tell my family I'm not crazy? I love that, Jennifer. It's a very common phenomenon that you're the one person that gets it and everybody else is like, what's wrong with you? And they don't see that. They're also having some issues. Maybe not as much as you, but you know, it's affecting everybody. Sleep sanctuary looks like what? Oh, good question, Angie. We think about removing EMFs from the bedroom, for example. That's a good start. Get your, you know, smart devices out of the bedroom so that it's easier for your body to rest deeply. Think about what we talked about today with just the EMF piece alone. That's a great place to start in creating a sleep sanctuary. You're not alone in this process. You do not have to navigate this journey alone. And also, most importantly, what your body's doing makes perfect sense. It is not too late for you to heal. Your body's just responding to being poisoned, that's all. So of course we wanna respect that and honor it. We just have to understand what happens in the body once we become poisoned so that we make the right decisions about how to heal. That's why other mold detoxes haven't worked, because they're missing some parts of the physiology. You're learning every time you try something. You're learning as you go. You're getting smarter as you go. And it is not too late for you to heal. I love teaching the brain. Foggy, sensitive, moldy people. I just adore it because I love watching you blossom and come back to yourselves. It is not too late for you to heal. Any mold driven symptom can get reversed. That's my favorite thing about this topic. We don't talk about unwinnable topics like give me a break. Why would we do that? So it's okay if it takes longer than you want it to, and it will. It's a project. You're on the right track now and you're putting the pieces together. You can trust your body. It's on your side and it wants to feel good.
Episode: EXPLAINED: How Mold Enters Through Your Sinuses, Hijacks Your Brain & Blocks Your Detox
Date: March 26, 2026
Host: Sinclair Kennally
In this solo “Explained” installment, Sinclair Kennally dives deep into how mold exposure—particularly through the sinuses—disrupts your detox pathways, hijacks your brain, and drives overwhelming symptoms. Drawing from personal experience and clinical expertise, Sinclair explores the interplay between mold, the nervous system, immune response, EMF exposure, and the very sequencing required for effective healing. She offers both biological understanding and practical, body-based techniques to empower listeners who are struggling with “mold illness,” fatigue, or mysterious chronic symptoms.
“Your nose coming into your sinuses is your body's shortcut for toxicants. Unfortunately, to go into the brain like mold, irritate the nervous system and also distort your own immune responses and hijack your gut. So, yeah, it matters a lot.” – Sinclair (00:00)
“There's a confluence here of multiple stressors on the body. So mold is going to impact you more directly and for longer, if there are other stressors, other disruptors to your body's own healing responses.” – Sinclair (01:55)
“If mold has already dysregulated your vagus nerve, and if it's pushed you into chronic fight or flight, now it makes sense that you've been trying to detox while your nervous system is stuck in survival mode.” – Sinclair (27:45)
“What the energy crisis is, right? When you need the energy the most, you have the least amount of it because of the mold, because it's shutting down your energy production. The great news is it's fixable.” – Sinclair (37:40)
“Detox reactions can trigger massive mast cell degranulation, worsening histamine and inflammatory responses. And your body's not making a mistake. It's responding to the poison…” – Sinclair (53:10)
“Mycotoxins easily cross the blood brain barrier and they access your brain instantly. They're lipophilic, which means they're fat loving. And your brain is very fat dense, isn't it?... So they're getting there through the blood, the, through the bloodstream itself, through the olfactory pathways. Your sinuses are a shortcut to your nervous system, to the brain itself.” – Sinclair (1:14:00)
"Aggressive detox without nervous system support creates unnecessary suffering. So we think about this in terms of what is the order of operations here. The order of operations is nervous system support and acknowledging the different ways that mold can harm you so that you make intelligent choices about what your detox should be." – Sinclair (1:04:44)
“You're not going to force your way into healing. That's why we address the nervous system first… Detox without nervous system support is like trying to work with one hand tied behind your back.” – Sinclair (40:45)
“Your EMF exposure, what the studies now show is that EMF exposure is really good at distorting our immune responses, actually in a very similar fashion to mold… It’s a compounding effect.” – Sinclair (1:19:20)
“You are not too reactive to heal. You're not too brain foggy to heal. And nobody can fix this for you but you…” – Sinclair (1:25:30)
| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------|---------| | 00:00 | “Your nose coming into your sinuses is your body's shortcut for toxicants...” | Sinclair | | 10:15 | “All we have to do...rest your forehead...It's really not complicated and it's free.” | Sinclair | | 27:45 | "If mold has already dysregulated your vagus nerve...now it makes sense that you've been trying to detox while your nervous system is stuck in survival mode." | Sinclair | | 37:40 | “What the energy crisis is, right? When you need the energy the most, you have the least amount of it because of the mold, because it's shutting down your energy production...The great news is it's fixable.” | Sinclair | | 53:10 | “Detox reactions can trigger massive mast cell degranulation, worsening histamine and inflammatory responses. And your body's not making a mistake. It's responding to the poison…” | Sinclair | | 1:04:44 | "Aggressive detox without nervous system support creates unnecessary suffering. So...the order of operations is nervous system support..." | Sinclair | | 1:14:00 | “Mycotoxins easily cross the blood brain barrier...your sinuses are a shortcut to your nervous system, to the brain itself.” | Sinclair | | 1:19:20 | “Your EMF exposure...is really good at distorting our immune responses, actually in a very similar fashion to mold.” | Sinclair | | 1:25:30 | “You are not too reactive to heal. You're not too brain foggy to heal. And nobody can fix this for you but you…” | Sinclair |
Sinclair’s teaching is grounded in compassion and practicality:
“You're not too reactive to heal. You're not too brain foggy to heal. And nobody can fix this for you but you. … Symptoms are just messengers. They are not failures. Your body's trying to tell you you've been poisoned. That's all. And it makes total sense.”
— Sinclair (1:25:30)