NaRon Tillman

back into bondage. So it was, it was the beginning path was, was really, really eye opening and life changing.

Dr Manon (04:30):

And had you always had available to you……… Encouragement to………to look at spirituality as a place for support or community? Or was that your own?

NaRon (04:50):

Yeah I grew up in a church. My grandmother used to bring me to prayer. My friends was out playing basketball and she would drag me to prayer three days a week. Well, we grew up in a Pentecostal church that I grew up in, my friends parents were really, really strict. My mom allowed us to live a little bit. So I listened to music, So that was in Sunday school. So that foundation was what led me back to church. When my grandmother passed away, I remember saying to myself, I’m never going to church again. I’m never to be around a religious setting anymore. And, but that was all part of the process.

NaRon (05:58):

The healing balm is the thing that we neglect the most

Dr Manon (06:04):

Too often…………when was your start?I want to really find out what happened.

NaRon (06:13):

Yeah. So then I started on a powerful entrepreneurialship. And by the time I was 24, I became a minister and getting into ministry was different. It was different because then I started to lose myself. I didn’t know who I was as a man and I was preaching, but I still never really could find a balance of being a minister and being a husband and being all the other things that came along with it. And I felt like that I had, I felt as if I had to do something. So I was always attempting to find people to heal or to save the world. Right.

NaRon (07:04):

And in the process, even though I thought I was better in myself, I isolated myself from my family. I isolated myself because I felt like being righteous was isolation. And that was commingled. So I found myself again, battling through spiritual depression and battling through fear and battling through anxiety as a preacher; it’s difficult. You can’t get up and say I’m hurting, right. Because people expect you not to be hurting. Right. And it took me some time. And that was the second thing. It took me some time to realize that I still needed to work on me as I was helping other people, it’s easy to tell everybody else to hold their head up. But then we forget that we have to encourage ourselves to hold our head up ministering and helping community became easier than me……. Self-maintenance

Dr Manon (08:08):

But do you, do you still hold the view that you did then that had you been more vulnerable about the experience that it would have? Like you were, you had to be a certain way to lead others. Is that still your………..?

NaRon (08:27):

Oh, my views have changed. I’m 44, 20 years of ministry. My views have changed from then to now drastically. And it was all part of the healing process. And it’s funny because what I’ve learned is that healing is a lifetime journey, right? So the process of healing is we’re always, we always find ourselves needing to go through those processes again, on some level, whether it’s gone back to devotion, personal devotion or prayer, whether it’s which I got into some years ago, which is going to transition, yoga and meditation and then coupling those things. So I got into yoga and I got into meditation. Growing up, I was taught that we shouldn’t meditate. I was taught that we, that we shouldn’t do these things, but I had a back problem. And I walked into this thing and I was running and like ran too long.

NaRon (09:39):

And my back gave out on me and I walked in…….. And I went in with the back problems, but I really didn’t understand the power that yoga brings and as a healing tool. And during hurricane Sandy, I met a guy named Eddie Stern. Who’s one of my yoga teachers. And I was, he asked me to come into a program with core realities, and I would watch him go into the inner city, this Caucasian Jewish name and spend time with these young, young men and young women teaching them yoga and the best yoga practices. And I would join in and practice. And then I started practicing with him. And in some years later he would ask me to be the director of the program.

NaRon (10:31):

But what happened with the Yoga when I really started to take it serious because I had high blood pressure hypertension, and I was taking medicine. And I’m like, why am I taking these pills when I have a tool that can help not necessarily reverse, but it can help me through the process of healing, the breathing with meditation techniques and the yoga. I started doing yoga four times a week on top of my other personal spiritual practices. And I had breakthrough, I had breakthrough, I was battling some personal issues and just get into the mat really, really helped me to get through those seasons, those tough times in my life. So I had to learn how to then couple ministry, yoga and meditation and all of the tools that I had, because I felt like I was split. I had my church, like, and then I had my yoga life and I started one ministries because I wanted to be able to combine and blend the two in most traditional churches. I can’t be like, Oh, we’re going to have a meditation practice. But if I found it, but I’m the founder of the church.

NaRon (11:58):

So the healing process starts in the mind. And I had to learn not to look externally at the things that were around me, the noise of the world, because some, some of the anxieties and some of the fears, whether we’re talking about physical elements in our body, or whether we’re talking about mental stuff that happened here. But if even our physical elements can be connected to something that’s psychosomatic. So bring in the connectivity between the mind and body experience. It’s something that I’ve been working on over the last five years and teaching others how to do that. Sometimes we have fears or sometimes we have things in our past retrospectively that we’ve tucked away in our body. Or we don’t understand that that energy is blocked right and we go through yoga and move or we breathe through it.

NaRon (13:05):

And we go through some meditation practice rather as a reflective meditation practice. I often do tears start to run down people face, right? Because they thought that that thing was gone. Right. And it doesn’t go on. We have to give it, we have to make it pay right. And expose it. And you say, okay, you can live here, but you can’t control. I’m the landlord, you’re a tenant and this is your space. Right? And that’s the process of mental healing. But then we have people that are, that I deal with that are physical, physical elements and they lose range of motion. And how do we get that? How do we help them through the process of finding range? People can’t touch their toes. People can’t lift their arm above their head. People can expand their arms out to the side, but being patient and tell them it’s okay if you just move your arm a little bit. But if you keep moving on a little bit, what happens is that range of motion comes back kind of like an inner tube in a bike. It can sit there and be in the water and this look dusty and it’s hard to move, but then if you keep circling it and you keep rotating it around that flexibility comes back into the inner too. It’s not magic. It’s just a little bit of elbow grease and a little bit of room, and then it happens. And that’s the process of healing.

Dr Manon (14:38):

I think you pointed out really well, how we, we live in a society that tends to separate the spirit from the body, from our thoughts and emotions. And when you start to integrate all of this, you start to realize that that also your pains and your beliefs that you’re old, or you can’t move, are actually just beliefs, you can really start to feel it and that as you heal your physical body, some of the emotions that you have stored release, and that also deals with like your spirituality, we’re all one connected. We just live in this delusion…….

NaRon (15:25):

And the separation that comes actually, all of it starts in the mind. We delude ourselves,And then some people say, well, we have the Christian churches first. So even then there’s separations that take place. And because we don’t see each other as one or as diverse. And I think that me being what has helped my faith is being in eclectic situations. I may not necessarily believe what the Buddhist beliefs, but their sense of community. I may not necessarily believe what some of my native American brothers and sisters believe but I listened to them and I’m like, Oh, okay, this explains this. So now I can bring that back to our traditions, which have been lost because of our culture. We’ve lost a lot of our Christian traditions because culture has trumped Bible where Bible’s supposed to trump culture. And then we can’t heal because we are trying to make the thing, the bomb, we’re trying to make the medicine into something that is not intended to do.

Dr Manon (16:52):

So when I brought up the vulnerability of the healing process how do you feel about that? Because as an entrepreneur we’re told, you know, be vulnerable share, that’s how people connect. That’s how they, they know that you, you figured some things out. You’re maybe just a little step ahead, therefore you can help them. That’s sort of the mindset of entrepreneurship. And as a doctor, you’re supposed to be the all knowing, and I’ve been taking that mask off every single chance I can say, well,I can tell you on some level what’s going on, but you really know what’s going on. I always feel that, that the patient deeply knows,

Dr Manon (17:50):

They’re given the opportunity, but instead we have a society that puts a label up. Here’s the diagnosis. That means this. And there’s your prognosis. If you buy that Koolaid, you’re not expanding into what we really can as human beings. We’re so much bigger than our diagnosis.

NaRon (18:13):

Wow. The NSD I think being vulnerable, it took me some time to become vulnerable again, because what happens with titles is that there’s this innate set of practices that come along with a title, right? So when people hear the word, pastor, you walk in the room and he’s supposed to be this reverence bigger than life, having all the answers. So once I learned how to be vulnerable, once I learned to say, I’m having a bad day, once I learned to say, I have my struggles, the connectivity with people pertain it. I think that sometimes we feel like people won’t respect us anymore. We’ll move on. Right? Well, people won’t look at you the same way people go through divorce, and then they scared to go outside because they’re afraid of what the community is going to say, because they don’t want to be vulnerable. They don’t want to open up to that wound again. But what I’ve learned is that if we are not vulnerable, confessing our sins, one to another, or confessing our faults, one to another, if we’re not going to lose, then we can’t help because we’re going to start to believe the lie. And when you carry yourself and say that you’re fine. And you know, you’re not, then you start to mask it or you start to develop habits to numb the pain. And we have our secret vices.

NaRon (20:02):

Most, leaders have most spiritual leaders have secret vices that they know they don’t want the world to know about, but they’re doing it because they’re not vulnerable. And they’re not taking the time now.

NaRon (20:28):

So what do you think about the subconscious……………………… I don’t believe in chance, but I believe in destiny, right? How does the pulling of the subconscious into a healing platform where people can…………………….

Dr Manon (21:06):

On the level of so-called chances. I believe very much what you’re saying is that we’re weak. I think we create our reality and therefore we also notice what we’re ready to see as well, because even our perception, even visually, we don’t perceive more than……… I think it’s 3% of what’s actually in front of our eyes. Wow. So if you think about it, if everything is limited to that small percentage, that is our reality, as we start shifting and doing our work or being more connected or coming from more love or we starting to see the world differently. So we start to, in that sense, I believe attract different things just because we can’t, it’s a very symbiotic, natural, no effort type of thing is the way I see it. And the other thing is if you come from gratitude and you can, you’re grateful for things, you’re going to start to see more things. You’re grateful for. It just, it works that way. If you put that into your noticing, then you start noticing more things. And it’s like, where are you? Put your attention or your focus. You tend to see more of that. That’s how I see that.

NaRon (22:36):

Wow. And that’s amazing because I’m in the process of writing a gratitude journal for people to do like a challenge, gratitude challenge, 30 days. And it’s funny that growing up as a Christian, growing up in a church, I learned about gratitude through my yoga practice. Like we call it praise, praise God. So we praise him for this praise from God, but we’re not practicing gratitude. Right. And I wanted to be intentional about bringing people into the context of practicing gratitude. I’ve taken the time out to, to be grateful for a bad day. Like, how can you be grateful for a bad day? Right. It didn’t take me out. Right. So we like being mindful of those things can invoke healing. It actually brings up because you changed your you’re looking at life differently. And the fact that you even mentioned that validated the fact that I’m on the right path with my gratitude journal.

Dr Manon (24:03):

Well, everyone has their path. It’s very much the belief that there is no one path, you know, but for, but for me, it’s something that I’ve noticed when we’re also bringing up the subconscious and how things happen. I do feel that that’s where the element of the deliberate creation comes into me and it can also deal with trauma. A lot can be where we store the things we have not processed either or early childhood stuff that stays sort of locked in our cells Right. So ,and they come up in healing. So when I find in the work I do, and I do a body work, these, these emotions, or these pains associated with emotions that they may not even be conscious of means they’re in the subconscious come up or an incident in life allows that to come back up. And that’s how incredibly beautifully made we actually are. You know, that we, we can’t, when we can’t deal with things we don’t. And when it’s the time that we can, that we can embrace it, that we’re able to truly heal from it. Those things will surface.

NaRon (25:32):

Growing up in the area that I grew up in, we have inner cities all throughout America. When I learned about negative bias, I started to say, wow, you know, growing up in the inner city, when you’re wrapped around violence, you’re wrapped around poverty, food deserts, all of those things that play into our mental health. And it leads into our physical health,It’s almost like a compounding negative bias because we’re already we’re already leaned towards negativity. And just from being human, we have to work to unravel that. But then imagine growing up where all of your music was talking about violence, all of your surrounding your schools, there was violence in the halls and in your homes that there was loud music and unhealthy diets and all those things that, all those obstacles that begin to compound on you, when you go out into the world, you’re viewing the world from that mindset completely. Yeah. And it’s so hard to peel back all of those layers. And as you start to peel back those layers and you start to really realize that, wow, I was really messed up.

Dr Manon (26:59):

I totally see that in the environment. I mean, the positive piece is if you can shift yourself through the environment, then you can go and shift the environment. But if you’re, if you’re brought up with one, one version of what life is and everything is, you know what do you call it, reinforcing one world view. And this reality, it’s not just a point of view. It’s a reality then you’re, you’re gonna live in that. You know I’ve seen, I don’t watch a lot of television…… I don’t actually have a television, only when I travel well, because I don’t like bad news, I don’t like selective news and they don’t report the amazing things that people do. The things like……I know there’s this amazing project in an inner city where this woman……..she started growing a vegetable garden and got all the kids involved and in doing that, and that changes everything. Right? So that’s the kind of work that I think allows people to shift and get exposed to something else. because we talk about, you know, even in this…….so-called pandemic, it’s like, yeah, our immunity matters. But if you don’t have access to proper food, if you only have junk food around, if that’s all, you know, like you said, it’s a lot of obstacles to overcome and say, okay, well, wait a minute here…….

NaRon (28:52):

It’s is a difficult, uphill battle with our our yogis program. We target those areas and we bring these practices, these healing techniques into the areas, and we deal with food and how to navigate through a food desert. We deal with dream custom visions. And we deal with who am I? What is your mindset? And we deal with all of those things. In the knowledge we deal with the opioid addiction that was going on and suicides that were happening in Kansas city. I mean, you figured out the adults who maybe living in a high middle class neighborhood, but their parents are always at work and they feel neglected and they have all these other issues that the great thing about yoga, the great thing about meditation, the great thing about prayer is that it can work in the inner city and it can work in a higher middle class neighborhood.

NaRon (30:02):

It can work with seniors and they can work with adults. It’s just getting people to practice, getting people to practice, and then they’ll see the value. Once we get them on the mat. Once I get a person, whether it’s a one on one experience or small group experience or large group experience, once we get them to feel the transformation that happens from one practice in their body, their spine feels longer. They feel excited that they’re happy with some breathing exercises. Sometimes they’re tired. Sometimes they just need to yawn. Sometimes they need to sit silent, but getting people on and exposing them to these practices is something that I’ve felt as a blessing that God has placed me here to be able to help people, regardless of where what their lot is in life.

Dr Manon (31:05):

Yeah. Well, it’s such important work because I do believe, like you say that it’s through experiencing it. It changes. You can think all you want or believe whatever, but when you actually connect to your body and experience a shift, it really changes so much. And then it opens up the curiosity.

NaRon (31:28):

But the amazing part is, and maybe you can help me with this you’re the doctor is that we know this right. We noticed, but then we struggle to get on with it. We struggle, to eat. Right….. Like the struggle is real sometimes. what do you think the biggest struggle for like those communities? Is it that they don’t there isn’t the money to do this? Or it’s not available to have the right foods. I mean, I was seeing some documentaries and it’s like, there’s you have to take a bus to get to some green vegetables. I mean, that’s, that’s a massive challenge.

NaRon (32:19):

what happens is you can’t bring into a marketplace, whats not in demand. Most of the time in these communities, the reason why the fast food industry, Chinese food McDonald’s stuff can survive is because of the quick fix you’re hungry, got to some Chinese. So opening a vegetable store.We might have one or two customers, but you want to make enough to really keep the lights on because we’re not being taught them the proper value of eating properly. So mindset has to be broken. And traditionally, if I was brought up on this type of food, my kids would be talking about generations of people that like having hypertension or high blood pressure. It’s like something that’s passed down, but it doesn’t have to be right. It doesn’t have to be. So thats just the mindset you watch, your grandmother take 20 pills a day. So now you go okay, grandma lived to 70, and she was taking 20 pills a day. Now I’m taking 20 pills. So, but the thickness is starting to happen at such an early age. Now, the obesity, the diabetes, and all of those things that come along with these processed food diets. And we start to now see younger people being, having elements that were used to our grandparents. Right. So now becomes a pandemic or epidemic within the community. But then what changes?

Dr Manon (34:21):

Well, I do think it is the process of awakening to this.

Dr Manon (34:30):

and the thing again, if you look to society as structured and it’s very different, I’m in Canada, there are similarities, but there’s also differences that way. And in the States, but if you look at how it’s structured, it’s completely money-driven. I don’t have a problem with money per se, but medical doctors typically are not trained in nutrition, maybe they have 11 hours. And that’s, in the schools where they actually teach nutrition. So even the fundamental belief that our bodies can heal is not accepted. We manage symptoms, manage disease. That’s the training!!!!. And so if you think that way, if that means that nobody can do anything for themselves, that’s going to actually make a difference, just wait until you get sick. Then you see a doctor and you manage your symptoms.

NaRon (35:33):

And that’s basically the party line,So there’s very little incentive for people to wake up, except when things get bad enough. And I think we’re definitely at the stage of bad enough. You know, when, like you say, when young children are having the same chronic diseases as grandparents, then it’s time to kind of wake up, well, it’s time before that, but then it’s never going to come from the top down. There’s no incentive to change while it’s making money and it’s working. And I think it’s people like yourself and the work you do, and the discussions that people have the community of daring to speak and share information. I think those things are what will make a difference.

NaRon (36:30):

Yeah. Thank you. I’m glad that you said that even from a medical perspective, that here in America, we are profit driven. And the biggest one of the biggest profits that is happening is in the medical field, even what’s going on with COVID and how billions of dollars being exchanged……….. i never even knew Fuji Johnson and Johnson was in medicine right? Everybody, wants to make a buck because it’s a business check to be made, we have to look at this. I couldn’t see this before. Like, when you’re in the water, you can’t really see the beach and you’re in the water. But when you start to………..when your eyes are open, you can’t close them back. And you know, you don’t want to be like the crying out to everyone………. Hey you know, things are not that good,….. you don’t want people every time they see me, they run away. So we’d have to kind of create solutions that answers to the problem. And I think that our programs really, really speaks to the elders of our communities.

Dr Manon (38:04):

I think that’s really awesome. And the timing is perfect because with this pandemic, the emphasis they have in so-called treating, it is again, like you said, it’s vaccines. It’s an external thing as if what we can do for ourselves to make ourselves stronger, doesn’t matter, which is why they don’t look at giving food to people. They don’t worry about the incredible media insanity of fear mongering and putting people into fear………..to me thats disempowering people and what, what needs to happen is that we really understand how powerful we really are and to honour our body and, and look after and feed our body……. Feed our mind, all of it, you know?

NaRon (39:10):

It’s important if the disease begins to fester. And by the time it starts to manifest itself, it’s too late.

Dr Manon (39:18):

I had one more thing I wanted to ask you wrote down a message you’d like to share as an expiration date.

NaRon (39:32):

Yes.

Dr Manon (39:36):

I thought that inspiring. So what, what do you mean by that?

NaRon (39:43):

Well, when you’re in a bad situation, you feel like it has no, end and you can’t see it. You can’t see the end. You don’t know. And every day you’re coming home and battling, it could be something with your children. It could be something that your physical body is going throuth, mental hygiene, mental health, and wellbeing. But if you keep living that will pass because every problem, regardless of what it is, even COVID is not going to, as our president says, it’s just going to up and disappear. It’s not going to disappear. We’re going to have to work towards it, but it does happen. Expiration is not going to manifest and be eternal. So every problem has an expiration date and some problems last a little longer than others, but we know trouble don’t last always.

Dr Manon (40:41):

Well, thank you very much.

NaRon (40:43):

Thank you very much. This was very pleasant and enjoyable. I think that you guys are doing a great job in Canada with the pandemic, and I hope that you continue.

Dr Manon (40:59):

We’ll see what happens. I really think it’s important to look at what’s happening in other countries and actually go to the sources because I have never seen so much misinformation in my life.

NaRon (41:32):

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Thank you for joining us. For more information, go to DrManonBolliger.com.