Your Health Is So Much More Than Just Physical with Melissa Deally on The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger

weak immune system. And this was all happening while I was still in the corporate world. And I didn’t actually know what I know today about health and wellness. So it just started my journey. And you know, everything happens for us. And looking back, I can see a number of different times in my life where I went through experiences that I now use when I’m working with clients and sharing and being an example. And I didn’t know anything about epigenetics, then either, but I knew that my father had died of cancer of melanoma, and I didn’t want to go down that path. So I was going to do everything that I could to make sure that this didn’t happen again. Two years later, I was let go from that corporate job. Big fish bought little fish. 24 year career ended in an hour’s notice to clear out my desk, no word of thanks. And through that experience, I realized I was never working for someone else again, that whatever I did next needed to be more of service to the planet and humanity. And I had no idea what that was going to be but I was open to being guided. And I was guided through my two daughters getting concussions at very similar times. And when I got the phone call that my second daughter had sustained a suspected concussion in grade eight gym class at school, I was driving down the highway, and on how sound was next to me, I was driving from Whistler to Vancouver. And I looked out across the ocean towards the heavens and said, Really, this is how you show me my path, stop taking out my children. So because I wasn’t working full time, I was able to go to the appointments with them. And I knew that, you know, the healing doesn’t happen at the appointment. It’s what you do between the appointments, right? So I was supporting all of that. And I had been doing all my own research around toxicities in the body and in the brain. And so I was interested in learning all of this and as much as I could. And we’re in a small town. So people were now asking me for support with their spouses concussions, their children’s concussions, et cetera, et cetera. And the great news is, is that both of my kids did fully recover. And I had been bringing a nutritional piece to it, what could we do nutritionally, to support the healing of their brain. And then I was invited to work at a holistic clinic, helping other people with concussions, because with downhill skiing, and downhill biking, there’s a lot of concussions. And I was interested in doing that, you know, I was just following where I was being guided at this point. And there was a need, and I couldn’t get insurance, liability insurance because I didn’t have a certification. Therefore, I thought, Okay, I need to go back to school and life coach had been bouncing around in the back of my head. So I called a friend who was a life coach and said, I need a certification, where did you do your life coaching? And he goes, You don’t need to be a life coach, you need to be a health coach. And I went, what, what’s that, so that was another download through him to me, that landed in a way that life coaching never had. And I jumped right in started my health coaching. And from the moment I got there, I knew I’d found my passion, my purpose, my next career, loved every moment of it couldn’t absorb the information fast enough, wanted to just keep studying, keep learning, and also is in a place of, I’m in my 40s, why don’t I know this about my body? I should right, but then I realized, well, I, you know, have a commerce degree. And I’ve been busy building my career and raising my family and being a wife and who had time to also learn all of this information. And I realized if I can share this with other people, in bite sized pieces that they can take and then implement into their daily lives, while busy doing all those things I was doing that I could be having an impact on humanity as I wanted. And health coaching then led me into integrative health, where I learned how to read functional medicine lab testing, so that we could get to the root cause. And that, of course, is key to someone truly healing when we understand why they have whatever they have, then we can do something about it. And that also resonated with me because I used to struggle with migraines. And one time when they were particularly bad, I went to my doctor, and all she could do was give me a stronger medication. And I said, I don’t want a stronger medication. I want to know why I suddenly have these migraines and they’re worse than they were. Because if they were if I know that I can make a change. And I wasn’t getting any answers until I went to my naturopath who said, why don’t we do some hormone testing. And we did that and discovered my progesterone levels were very low and the symptom for me was migraine. So then we she gave me this, you know vial tonic that I had to drink for a teaspoon of it for a week for two months, and of my cycle and my migraines went away. So I’m very much about understanding the why. So this work continued to resonate with me. And I was working with clients and having great results and really helping people either come back from chronic illness or get to a place where they’re, you know, much less likely to have any kind of diagnosis of chronic illness. But not everybody could do what I was asking them to do in terms of lifestyle changes, they’d start and they’d fall off and they knew they should do it, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. So I started wondering, why do some people do this and other people don’t. And that’s when I was introduced to NLP and timeline therapy and hypnotherapy and the power of the unconscious mind and the patterning that we develop as young children between the ages of zero to six, zero to eight, as we’re learning to live in society. And for some people, those patterns were blocking them from moving forward, their inner five year old was running their life. And as I learned those tools, I realized I can now elicit those patterns and rewire their neurology into a pattern that’s working for who they’re becoming versus who they were and get them results very quickly so that they could achieve the goals they want which is you know healthspan. And so that’s where their friendly toxin slayer comes in because the the process of doing that, in my work is I always start people with a physical detox because we live in a toxic world. And most people need that our livers are overburdened and need some help.  And then we move into the emotional and the mental detox, all those stuffed down emotions from all those years ago, because society again teaches us not to bring our emotions out, you know, boys don’t cry, you know, be a big girl, etc. Don’t bring your emotions to work. So we carry them around like a bag of rocks, and they weigh us down. We release all of that. We rewire the neurology, as I said, in terms of the patterns that we elicit through that process. And we release the mental toxicities, those voices in our head, that are 99.9% complete BS, and yet we listen to it. And I always encourage people speak talk back to our mind.  When it comes to other human beings, we should, you know, listen more and talk less. But when it comes to our own mind and the voices in our head, we need to talk more and listen less, because so much of it is BS and talk back to it and say no, that’s not true, cancel, cancel, cancel, put a positive spin on whatever that is. So we release those limiting decisions, those limiting beliefs, again, many of which were made in young childhood. And then we use hypnotherapy, and quantum SMART goals in order to replace those limiting beliefs with the beliefs that again are going to get the person where they want to go and and who they’re becoming. And then we work with spiritual toxicity as well. Now I don’t do that myself, I partner with a reverend who’s also NLP trained, and she takes people through their spiritual detox. And when we address all four bodies, that’s how we get to lasting health and health span, because by the time a symptom shows up in the physical body, it’s already moved through the spiritual, the mental and the emotional body. And then there’s a symptom that we tend to ignore for a long time. And I always encourage people, now that symptom is talking to you and asking you to do something different it’s not to be ignored, no matter how small. When it’s small, it’s easier to correct rebalance. So we have to then go back up and clear, the mental, emotional and spiritual bodies, to ensure that whatever it was, doesn’t come back again, in a couple of years. That’s how we create and healthspan and optimal health.

Manon Bolliger  12:17

That makes sense, out of curiosity, because the body is the manifest of a lot of our health, emotions.

Melissa Deally  12:30

Absolutely.

Manon Bolliger  12:31

Even our spiritual leanings, or beliefs or programs, right, so how does it work? Have you worked in different ways? Because you have these four pillars, you know, starting with the spiritual one, and seeing if that undoes, you know, how far they can go backwards. So I’m looking at sort of the model of unraveling, you know, how things get unraveled. Have you worked in different ways? I know a lot of people work the physical first. There’s logic for that. But there’s also equal logic, I think, for working the the mental, emotional, or the spiritual. Have you had any cases like that where…

Melissa Deally  13:20

So I do tend to start with the physical body first, because that’s where most of my clients can understand and relate to the healing process. A lot of my clients don’t yet understand the mind body connection.

Manon Bolliger  13:36

Okay.

Melissa Deally  13:36

And so I have experienced one time where I started with the emotional first. And we didn’t have a deep enough rapport because we hadn’t worked together enough. And that person decided that this type of program wasn’t for them, and they never came back. And so since then, I’ve, I have chosen to go back to the physical detox first, which is a three week program where we are building that deep rapport, and they’re already starting to feel better in their physical body and realizing, okay, she does know something, and this is helping me often by the time they come to me, they’ve tried so many different things. And they’ve lost hope, because they’ve tried these things that haven’t worked, right. So I have to rebuild their hope, and build and build that rapport in that process. So that we can then work together in the emotional and the mental detoxing, because that’s, that’s deep. So that’s my experience of why I do it the way I do it.

Manon Bolliger  14:34

Yeah. Okay. And I hadn’t fully understood that you do it first physical, and there’s reasons for it, right. Like, in this case, it’s sort of the safer rapport built this way, which, you know, arguably is the case for certain patients for sure.

Melissa Deally  14:53

Yes, and because I don’t do the spiritual my partner does if she were to have somebody come to her to work with her on the spiritual first, and then she was to refer them for me to me. We could work backwards then, because that person is able to…

Manon Bolliger  15:11

Think that way.

Melissa Deally  15:12

Exactly.

Manon Bolliger  15:13

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, and I guess that’s a possibility, right? Since back and forth. Yeah, no, it’s interesting. Yeah, I like it when people have different pillars that they’re trying to go through, it makes it a lot easier for people to follow their own health, guidance, and just the fact that you have a pillar called, you know, physical. And another one emotion is just like, Oh, do you think there’s anything to do with how I feel right. It puts it out there in very clear terms, you know, so.

Melissa Deally  15:48

Exactly. And you and I, of course, both know that there is a lot to do with how you feel. But the average person doesn’t know that because societally we’re not taught that. And even if you go to medical doctor, they don’t talk about your emotions or your mental state, they’ll send you to the psychiatrist. They’re just looking at the physical. So that’s what societies generally used to. And so this is all an education process of guiding them through the four pillars. Absolutely.

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Manon Bolliger  17:26

So let’s talk a little bit about this that you were saying just before we began that, you know, the end, it seems like you’re very intuitively drawn to the next thing. As you mentioned with your daughter’s suddenly this is what happened. And then off we go. And now we have these four pillars. There’s a kind of a new pull a little bit towards the the issue with girls. Do you want to maybe educate us a little bit on that? And yeah, and what what is happening there for you?

Melissa Deally  18:01

Absolutely. So Girls Matter is a nonprofit that I started in 2017 with two other co founders, I have been a Girl Guide leader in the US, its Girl Scouts for any US listeners for 20 years. And back in 2013, I went to…I took my girls to a documentary called Girls rising on International Day of the woman. And it was a documentary all about girls being denied the right to go to school simply because they were a girl. And it dove into girls being married off at very young ages and becoming slaves to their husbands/masters. And I, I have traveled extensively in my life. I’ve been to third world countries, I know this is happening. But to watch it in this documentary sitting in that room with 25 young girls, all of whom take their education for granted myself included my own two daughters there, I just had tears running down my face. Because it was 2013. We shouldn’t still be having girls fighting for the right for an education and being cast off as less than citizens. And I truly believe that education should be a right and not a privilege. And in that moment, I thought I need to do something. I don’t know what I don’t know how but I need to do something. And so I had that percolating in the back of my head for quite some time not really knowing how to start but knowing that somewhere down the line, I needed to help the girls. And at the end of 2016 I was at a conference. And the speakers said we’re all put on this earth for three things to never stop learning be of service, find your passion, your purpose. And he said and you don’t have to know how you just have to know your why. And that really resonated with me and I’m like I know my why but I don’t know how but now he’s telling me I don’t have to know my how. That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for the better part of three years. Now I realized I just need to tell people about this. And then the resources will be gifted to me. And so I left that conference and I called the only two people that I knew in British Columbia that had a nonprofit organization. And I say, Can you please show me how to start a nonprofit here? And they said, What do you want to do? And I told them, and they said, we want to do it with you, and why don’t we piggyback it on the nonprofit we already have, which is Preschools in Uganda, and Nepal. And the preschools were set up a few years prior because the elementary schools were so crowded that these little young kids were getting into elementary school and then still coming out illiterate because they were just falling through the cracks. And so in these small villages, they were setting up preschool so that the kids could start learning their one two threes their ABCs earlier, so they could hold their own when they got into elementary school. We already had teachers on the ground, they already had a school building, etc. And so it was beautiful because January 2017, we launched and since then, we’ve expanded into partnering with an organization in Kenya called Jolly Sisters. Jolly Sisters helps the women of the slums, create businesses, whether it’s a market stall, whether it’s making beautiful cards that are sold online to international audiences, whether it’s sewing menstrual supplies for girls, and we now support the girls of those mums in going to school. We’re supporting girls in a little tiny village of Boo Yah Yah, in Uganda. It’s on the side of Mount Elgon, this closest small town is Seronco. Since 2017, we’ve now had three girls graduate from university, we have one more graduating in June, and more girls going through school. And we’re actually this year we launched a menstrual supply campaign so that the girls aren’t missing a week of school every single month for lack of supplies. And in Uganda, we partnered with Rotary who built a manufacturing plant, and they make the supplies there and then ship them, hand deliver them actually to our girls. And the reason I do that is that then we’re also supporting the economy. And you know, others have jobs in Uganda as a result. In Kenya, we sent the funds so that they could buy the materials and then the moms would be making the menstrual supplies so they would get paid an income for doing so. And the girls would still get the supplies. And now because of these graduates, we’re moving into micro financing, the girls are wanting, all of the girls are wanting to start businesses. We’re happy to support that. But we’re not having to just hand over more money, right. So one of the girls is a seamstress. She’s made beautiful clothes. In fact, I just got the most adorable photos yesterday. The kids that were graduating from preschool all now have caps and gowns because she made them for them. And it was so cute. And they’ll be able to use those year after year, right. But because she’s finished school, she doesn’t have access to a sewing machine anymore. But she makes beautiful clothing, beautiful bags, she can earn a living and make a really good living from what she can make if she had a sewing machine. So we are not going to just give her the money for a sewing machine. We’re going to loan her the money for a sewing machine once she writes us a business plan and we’ve sent her a fillable booklet we’ve partnered with a business coach who made his booklet that he uses with his clients, he totally put Girls Matter logo on it and branded it for us. We’ve sent that over. So the two girls that are asking for money for businesses can learn how to write a business plan following the booklet and then send that to us to approve so that we can provide the funding. That funding will then when it’s repaid go back towards another girl’s education. So we’ve really grown particularly this year, I have a great board of directors that are very supportive. And this work is really powerful. We’re going to now be putting on an event in March of 2024. On March 8, the International Day of the Girl is a fundraising event. And just bringing this message to the world because those of us sitting here in North America, most people do not realize that the girls in Africa don’t have menstrual supplies, which means for one week of every month of every year for about 40 years of their life, they stay home. We’ve just all gone through a pandemic where we had to isolate and stay home supposedly right? And nobody likes that. But this is their reality for one week of every month. And we just don’t think that they don’t have it. But for $10 donation, you can supply a girl with washable reusable pads that will last for a year. And what’s $10 to somebody in North America for most people, it’s giving up 1.5 Starbucks drinks a month. Right? So we have our donation website. It’s girlsmatter.ca. And this year too wonderful news is the CRA Canada Revenue Agency changed their laws such that we as a nonprofit can now provide tax receipts. So we worked through a company called Give Wise and they monitor our transactions back and forth and make sure we You know, follow all the CRA rules in order to be able to give tax receipts that you instantaneously get that when you donate on our website. So you get to, you know, use that at the end of the year when you submit your taxes. And meanwhile, our mission is literally to stop teenage marriages, which stops teenage pregnancies, and give the girls a leg to stand on and break the poverty cycle, one girl, one family, one village at a time.

Manon Bolliger  25:25

Quite amazing. Yeah, I can see I can see the draw for that too. But, you know, they all come together, because first you have to be able to, you know, deal with the basic things of our health cycles, you know, and, yes, provide for that. But then really, the education that comes in, you know, the other four pillars are, are there, right, like, you know, what are the stories that were told? Or they were told, you know, what keeps the system going? What are the beliefs that they have, you know, all of that, right, as the cultural, you know, and it’s cultural. But it’s also, it’s also political, because, you know, we know, the world is much more complex than just that, you know. I mean, there’s, you know, Africa has had its resources pillaged, and just live for years by, you know, not just the US, but other, you know, other…

Melissa Deally  26:33

Western worlds say.

Manon Bolliger  26:35

Western world, you know, so it’s like, you know, we can always say, Oh, well, they’re, they’re in that position, oh, we need to help them. It’s like, hello, you know, economically if we didn’t pillage, they wouldn’t be in this position, you know, right. Right. But then if you’re starting with the girls, which is where you are right now, there’s undoing all of this belief that thats how life has to be, you know.

Melissa Deally  27:03

Yeah, there was a stat and the stat is what really struck me during watching that documentary that if India could educate just 1% more girls, they would grow their GDP by $55 billion per year. And that’s where I kind of went, That’s the answer, right? Not easy, but it’s simple. Just educate the other half of the population, we can grow the GDP of the country, and the countries will come out of poverty, right. But because of politics, etc. It’s not easy. There’s lots of paths to navigate, which is why we have people on the ground, we don’t sit here saying this is what you need. We collaborate with them. And you know, I just found some other amazing resources this week, and I’m not just going to assume they need them. I’m asking is this something that would be helpful for you if we could fundraise in order to bring this to your village, right, so really cool ways of accessing power, as well as if you think of a tea pot and a cozy, there’s a company that’s called Eternal Flame, he’s in the UK, we’ve just been connected. And he’s basically making these insulated cozies, for one to have another turn around, they’re cooking pots, so they don’t have to burn as much wood all day long, and breathe in as much smoke. And also, it’s the girls that aren’t in school that are sent off into the woods to get the wood. And the men know the girls are there. And so there’s often rape happening while the girls are searching for wood, right? So this solves a lot of problems. However, I don’t want to just assume that the people I’m working with need that. So we always ask first and listen to them as to what they need before we do anything. Yeah, but it’s really powerful work, very rewarding work, and so much need. I have people sometimes ask me, why did you call it Girls Matter? What about boys matter? You know, what’s the big deal? And I said, yeah, in most of the world, all over the world, boys matter, but not in all of the world do girls matter? They really don’t. And that’s why we called it Girls Matter is to highlight that, that girls do matter. And let’s support them in being able to stand up and stand on their own two feet. And something I didn’t mention was that at our AGM in November we were talking about, we’d like to have a mentor for our girls that are finishing up school, you know, the ones that are in grade 12. And maybe looking at where do they want to go to university, the ones that are finishing up University. And literally a week later, I was gifted that mentor in a networking group, who was a woman from Nigeria who lives in Texas, who when she did her intro said I support families with autism because she has an autistic son and I stand up for women in Africa. And because she said that I introduced myself slightly differently. And I talked about Girls Matter first. And so she wanted to connect and we did we had a wonderful conversation. And partway through that conversation, she said I’d like to be a mentor to your girls. She didn’t know that we discussed that at our last meeting. She just said that. And again, I was like, Thank you, that was the gift that I needed. And so our first mentor call between her and our girls in Boo Yah Yah, is happening this Saturday. And it’s beautiful. Because again, she’s an African sister of theirs, she was able to leave Nigeria, because she really stood up for herself and had the guts and courage to do so, and got to the US and put herself through university. If I were to be their mentor, even with all of my coaching skills, they could still say, yes, but you’re white, it’s different for us. Right? They can’t do that with Dr. M. And so that’s the power in her being their mentor, and I’m really excited for for that opportunity.  Yeah it sounds, it reminds me of how, like, there’s an alignment that’s happening. You know, and they say, ask and you shall be given. But, it really is like that, right? It’s like… It really is.

Manon Bolliger  31:03

Yeah. And it’s, and it’s funny, because whether it’s in health, whether it’s, you know, your journey as the patient looking for solutions, or the practitioners journey in deciding what’s the best way to serve, or what you’re doing, it’s kind of all the same. It really is that idea of, you know, following what is, what’s coming up, what’s opening. And then asking, not assuming that this or that is needed, or, you know, just staying very present to the needs that are real, and to the vision that comes. Right? And people show up. It’s quite amazing. It’s a it’s a beautiful story, I mean, story, it’s a true reality. But it’s, I can see it woven like a story. In the story.

Melissa Deally  32:01

It’s also teaching me more, trust myself more faith. Because right now, for the last six weeks, everything has been just landing for Girls Matter. On the flip side, nothing much is landing in my business. And it’s the end of the year, and is normally the time of year that everybody wants to get on their health journey, and they’re signing up for my programs. And that’s not happening. And so while it’s hard to be like, Okay, where’s my income coming from? I can’t help but follow this path of what’s been gifted to me with Girls Matter, just all of these opportunities, all of these people, I’m connecting with and the collaborations that are gonna happen out of it, because I can clearly see that’s where my focus is meant to be right now. And they’re making sure the heavens above are making sure I focus there right now by shutting down the other side.

Manon Bolliger  32:58

Well, I think that is when they say, you know, waking up to the new world. And I don’t mean, Klaus Schwab’s new world. I mean, the new world that we’re all, you know, co…

Melissa Deally  33:10

Where he will go down.

Manon Bolliger  33:13

And where people will be held accountable for the crimes they have done, you know, but our role is really to follow the heart and trust the…trust the plan, which is, you know, we’re all part of the plant already, we’re all part of what has to be created is created by creating, it’s like, There’s no way around it. Right. You gotta do it to do it. And, you know, there’s no shortcuts. But I think this is the way into, you know, and yes, money has been such a huge part of how we’ve been educated, how things happen. And I think that that might change, you know, we might see things very differently. When that becomes or the systems end up, falling, or failing. Because everything has an end, you know.

Melissa Deally  34:10

Exactly. And so, what is being birthed, looks really beautiful, really, really beautiful. And I’m just, I feel so fulfilled in my peace in what this is, and I’m showing up in my light every single day in order to keep moving forward in a place of positivity.

Manon Bolliger  34:36

Well, thank you so much for sharing your passion and your journey with us.

Melissa Deally  34:44

Thank you. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me here on the show.

Ending

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