When she said that, a light bulb went off in my mind because in

1990, 34 years ago now,

I had a case of acute pericarditis, which meant

that my pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart and

protects your heart, became inflamed, probably from a

virus. We don't know. I was traveling. I was on

an overnight train in Spain, coming from. I had been in

Morocco, and while trying to sleep, my chest started

to close down, my breathing started to get painful,

and so I hopped off the bed and I walked back and forth in

the train like I would do if I was spinning

from too much alcohol or something and just try to bear down and get

through it. But it just kept getting worse and worse.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode

of Open Heart Surgery with Boots. Oh, my gosh.

We are coming up on the two year anniversary of when I even had

this idea of starting a podcast for open

heart surgery. And hilariously, I didn't even listen to

podcasts, and it just kind of came to me like this

existential nudge. And here

I am two years later, and what you don't

see is Michael Mori, who is my engineer in the

background, who helps me edit these episodes.

And I think I'm making his job easier because I'm saying less

ums. So thank you for sticking with

me all this time and thank you for continuing to come back.

Please do consider supporting this podcast on Patreon. You

can find the links in the show notes. This is definitely not

done for free, and I have been so happy and

honored to keep this podcast going. But it does feel

good when I see support coming from willing

donors. And if you sign up for the second or third

tier, then you get to be a part of the Zoom community, which

I'm just now getting going. So be sure to go check that out. And

you will absolutely make my year if you become a Patreon

supporter. But, oh, my goodness. Enough jabbering.

Let's get to today's episode with Jeremy Rothenberg. Jeremy,

welcome. You're coming to us from Ashland, Oregon,

and I could not be more tickled to have you. And you

are, my gosh, I think my second or third friend that I've made actually

through substack, so substack for the win.

Nice. Jeremy, will you please introduce

yourself and kind of set the scene of, like, who you are,

what you're about. You have overcome an incredible

story that I have never heard of before. So I'm even more excited

about that. I mean, I'm not Excited about what happened to you, but I'm excited

to have your story on the podcast. But first, set the

scene of who Jeremy Rothenberg is. Oh, thank you.

So happy to be here and talk to you after listening to you for so

long. Who I am. I am an

acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist, and I'm

also a wellness coach. I sometimes call myself an

executive wellness coach because I work with executives

and creative professionals and mostly in the tech industry. We're. Once

upon a time, I used to work and I live in

Ashland, Oregon. Moved here about six years ago

from Oakland, the Bay Area and California, where

I had an acupuncture practice for 10 years and before that

did about 15 years doing various types of producing and

product managing in the. In the. In the tech industry. Yeah. Do you want me

to go on from there or. Well, I just gotta say, that's quite the

pivot. Yeah. Well, this. This all plays.

Plays nicely in, in this whole story. Just very briefly

on that. You know, working in that world, I

felt that I wasn't really doing what I was meant to

be doing in life. Even though I liked it. It was. It was fun,

smart people. I was making a good amount of money. I always felt drained,

and I always felt like I was losing energy rather than gaining

energy. And at one point, I had an

experience where I started having panic attacks after

having my heart starting to skip a beat.

So one day. I'll just tell a quick story. One day I was

working a small job as a favor for my

cousin over the Christmas holiday, and I was

qaing back then, what was CD

ROMs know like

for? Yeah, and. And it was such a. It was

such a repetitive job that I really wasn't that happy

about doing, but I was. I was doing it anyway. And I. My. I felt

my heart started to skip beats and it.

It like threw me into a panic attack. Why? Because weeks before

that, I had just come home from visiting my father on the

east coast after he had quintuple bypass

surgery with Dr. Oz. And yes, it's

that Dr. Oz what he was back. Back then when he

was still a top cardiac surgeon in New York

before he became the character that you know him as.

And my father had quintuple bypass surgery, which is

like, I think as many as you can possibly have. And I had these

skipped beats and suddenly something came in my mind that something was wrong with

my heart. And I had these panic attacks which led

to me working briefly with an energy healer

who set me completely at ease Set my

heart completely at ease. And I realized, you know what,

two things here. One, I have to learn to do what he did.

And number two, I have to do what I know that I'm supposed to be

doing in life, which is helping people and working directly

with the mind and the body rather than on

these interactive products, you know, that I, that I was

working on for in the tech industry. That was the beginning of this

story, to be quite honest, because it will come back, we'll come back to understand

that those immediate, those skipped beats were a

result of something that led to the surgery that I had last

year. And I'm still stuck on Dr. Oz. I honestly forgot

he was, he was. Actually a top

surgeon, I believe, at Columbia Presbyterian

in New York City. I'm gonna have to dig into that separately.

He. He really. Okay, that's for another time.

That's. Yeah. So it's just an interesting thing. Yeah.

So, okay, yeah, you've set the scene, but like, give us the

big overarching picture of. Well, first of all, how old are

you? So I'm 55 years old now. That was

back in 2001 or

2002, when I first started feeling these

heart related symptoms that I just.

And I had those checked out and they were checked out to be normal. They

were called PVCs, premature ventricular contractions.

People have them. It wasn't considered an

issue. It was only, only looking back 20 years now that I

realized that maybe they had something to do with this issue

of my pericardium. Yeah. Which, which. That's the great

segue into giving us the big picture of. Give us

the 50,000 foot view. And then we're going to go back and connect

some dots and help the listeners understand your

process. Yeah. So last year, well, In

August of 2023, I was

diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, which

was as astonishing as it could possibly be because I didn't

have any symptoms of liver

cirrhosis. And I was only

investigating my liver because

a year before that I started having atrial

fibrillation. And atrial fibrillation is when the atrium of your

heart start to beat wildly. And

it's usually not a life threatening situation, but

it can cause blood clots, which can cause stroke. So there

is concern about it. I tripped into

atrial fibrillation two weeks before my daughter's bat

mitzvah in, in 2023

and didn't come out of it for three

months. Because I live in a small town, I

couldn't get to see a cardiologist for Three months. And because

I was in pretty good shape, it didn't really affect me that much. The only

reason why I knew that I had the atrial fibrillation is because my apple watch

told me I did. You know, it alerted me and said, you have atrial fibrillation.

I started measuring everything and I realized, oh, my. My

resting heart rate is now 30 beats above what it was

before. And when I exercise, everything goes about 30 beats higher

than it did before. So I ha. I eventually had to get a

cardio version, which is a shock, like a defibrillator, but in a,

you know, in a surgical environment. And I did that.

January 2024. And that's reset my heart

rhythm. And that was great. And I talked to my cardiologist and I said,

hey, many years ago, I was tested for life

insurance, and they came back with the blood test,

and everything was normal except this one liver enzyme called

ggt, which they normally don't test for. But when

it's high, mine was kind of off the charts high. When it's high, it can

signal that you might be an alcoholic or you might have some, like,

bile duct issues. So the life insurance people are.

That's. They cut you out. And I was shocked about that.

And I talked for. To doctors, any doctor I would see over the next

bunch of years, I would ask about that. And they all kind of shrugged their

shoulders and they're like, well, if everything else is normal, your alt ast,

the other liver enzymes, which are normally checked, they're normal. It's probably just

who you are. You probably just have a weird GGT level. And so

I went on with my life. Never didn't really think about it too

much. But I asked my cardiologist at this point, I said, you know, I

have this high GGT thing. Could this have anything to do with my atrial

fibrillation? And she said, well, she didn't know. She did some

tests, came back, everything came back negative. She sent, then sent

me to a GI people, and I had coordinated

my cardio version to be at the beginning of the year so that I could

use up my deductible immediately so that I could,

you know, use my insurance that year as much as possible. And so

my deductible was up. I said, okay, I'll go do a bunch of lab tests.

That's fine. And so I went to see a GI person,

went through all these lab tests. Some of them started coming back a little off.

Had an ultrasound of the liver or of the

abdomen. And that said, like, you know, there were some blood flow issues in the

liver, so we did something called a

elastography ultrasound, which measures the. The

flexibility and the density of, of an organ. So

that was. Say that again, slower elast.

Elastography, like elastic

elastography. I've never heard of that. I hadn't

either. And. And that comes back with a scale of

zero to four for liver fibrosis, four

being cirrhosis. Liver cirrhosis. Mine came back at

four. And I remember, you know, reading that

result at my kitchen table and just my jaw

dropping to the floor. This is weeks after a very, very

close friend of mine died from cancer. And I was like,

wow, my turn. And

that was shocking. Absolutely shocking roller coaster

because why would you have liver cirrhosis?

Right? I was not an alcoholic. I generally

eat a, you know, healthy, generally low carb

diet. There's no way I had a fatty liver or anything like that.

So we assumed that it must be like some kind of autoimmune

disease. We checked for autoimmune hepatitis,

hepatitis, anything under the sun. All of it came back a little

inconclusive, but mostly, mostly negative.

And interestingly, where I live. Right, you don't. The. What

I found out is you have a certain level of medical availability

here, and then there's a certain level that you have to travel for. There are

no hepatologists, which is a liver specialist in the Rogue

Valley, where I live, at all. So when I got this diagnosis,

I, I remembered that a close friend of mine worked in liver

transplant at UCSF in California, in San Francisco. And so

I contacted her. She quickly had me contact

a hepatologist that she worked with. And I didn't have out

of network insurance. I could only stay in Oregon. This woman, Dr.

Lai, she is kind of my savior. She. She consulted with

me for free, and she thought about

it. She, you know, looked at the results of everything that I had. And she

said, you know, there seems to be some kind of issue

with blood flow. You really should have your heart

checked for pressures. It could be something

like constrictive pericarditis or something

in that realm. And when she said that,

it, it, it, you know, a light bulb went off in

my mind because in 1990,

34 years ago now, I had a case of

acute pericarditis, which meant that my

pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart and protects your heart,

became inflamed, probably from a virus.

We don't know. I was traveling an overnight train in Spain,

coming from. I had been In Morocco. And while

trying to sleep, my chest started to close down, my

breathing started to get painful, and so I hopped

off the bed and I walked back and forth in the train

like I would do if I was, you know, spinning from too much alcohol or

something and just try to bear down and get through it. But it just kept

getting worse and worse. So we got off the train prematurely in

Barcelona, went to a hospital, and that's where

eventually they discovered that I had what they

said was acute pericarditis. I'd never heard of that before. And they said they

couldn't really do anything but give me ibuprofen and rest.

And eventually left the hospital, went home to New York.

This was. I was so fatigued after that for a few weeks.

It was. It was really monumental thing. I remember very, very clearly. But

after that, I forgot about it. Hmm. Completely forgot about. Didn't.

Didn't follow up with any Doctors. I was 21 years

old. And so the rest of my life up

until now, what probably happened was the inflammation

and the response to the inflammation started to calcify the

pericardium, harden it to. To what that the surgeon

would describe as bone level

calcification. No way. And,

yeah, it's like breaking it off, you know, like, and

literally cracking it off of my heart. Some of it was

so. Was. Was deeply intertwined

with the heart muscle, and so that part couldn't come off. So

this is now we're talking about your open heart surgery? That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the. So she.

She was like. I emailed her back and said,

wow, you know, I had this thing, cute pair card is. And

she. And she responded to me. She was like, wow. I was. I was even

a little hesitant to say that to you because it was such an out there,

even know, kind of textbook diagnosis that you would do in a. In

a class or something like that. It's not something you really see in. In

reality. And you know, from there that was. There

were a bunch of tests had to happen. After that, we had all my

care moved up to OHSU in Portland, you know, where I had

a catheterization to check the pressures in the heart. I had a

heart MRI to, you know,

to really just make sure that this was what was going on.

And the only treatment for it is surgery, which is

a. Called a pericardiectomy. Okay, so hang on.

Before we get to the pericardiectomy, when you did

all those heart tests in Portland, did they all

show that your. Your heart needed some serious Help. They all

showed exactly what she said. Constrictive

pericarditis. So what it is, if you think about it,

it's just instead of that pericardium being flexible

and when your heart beats it, it moves with it. It's

now hard, so your heart doesn't have as much

space to open and close. Okay.

So what it does, what you see on a

catheterization, from my understanding, is you see

a certain pressure signal so that when the beat comes in and goes

out, normal thing would run rise and fall in a particular way,

and this would rise and fall in a different way. And they call that

like a square root sign. And it, you know, mine

was textbook. That. Very clearly

that. And also the, the, the MRI very

clearly showed this calcification. Also,

years ago, because I have a lot of heart issues

in my family, I had what's called a calcium test,

which is a CT scan that everybody should actually have.

It's very inexpensive, it's not covered by insurance, but it

costs a couple hundred dollars, maybe two or three hundred dollars, and it tells you

about the calcification in your arteries and it gives you a sense of, like,

how dangerous your situation is, you know, for, for heart

disease in general. But the, the cardiologist who I met in,

at OHSU in Portland showed me the pictures from that calcium

test, which nobody had showed me the years before that I had taken

it. He said, yeah, there's some calcium in your arteries, but look at the, look

at your pericardium. It was, it was thickened and it was.

The calcium was all, all in there. And nobody had

ever said anything about that to me. Was it in the report?

It said, in the report, it said something like, yeah,

pericardial calcifications, but didn't say it in any way

that made it sound dangerous. That I had a. I

think I had an echocardiogram 20 years ago

that also came back with some pericardial

calcification. Nobody ever made a

deal about it. I never thought about it until now. So all of the, all

of the tests were very clear in suggesting this is what it

was. You're not the first person, and even myself,

everyone I've had the honor and privilege of interviewing for this

podcast. Almost every single person, if they

do read their report, you know, the report is usually not

sounding alarms. It's just reporting facts of what the radiologist

sees. But then the cardiologist

usually doesn't get excited

or is overly incentivized to, to

educate us on what is found in a Radiology report. And so

what I always say, and I think you would agree here, it's

don't take our doctor's word for it, like go back and read our own

reports and then ask questions. You know, like, Dr.

Google can get us into trouble and it can

dysregulate us. So you need to be able to go and

like research what these terms mean from like a grounded,

calm nervous system. Because there can be things on

Dr. Google that can be scary. So it's a fine line

of, of educating ourselves, but then not overly educating

and jump to the conclusion that we're going to die tomorrow.

Well, let me tell you about chat, Dr. Chatgpt.

Ah. Because what I did with all of my test

results that came in is I fed them into this AI chatgpt

and it would, it would come back with like all the, like

act very specific recommendations about

what this could possibly be. Right? So when you look things up on Google,

obviously you get these very broad issues,

right? You could be dying from this, that and the other thing.

ChatGPT like looks at the lab tests and say, well, these lab tests suggest

that it could be this or it could be that. And then, you know, put

more, put more information and more information, more information. So it

definitely helped me push my local GI

to help me get a liver biopsy, which she was

actually weirdly reticent to do

because it kept telling me, you know, you might have cirrhosis, you

might not. The, the elastography is not the, the last

word on this. The gold standard is to get a piece of your

liver basically, and, and see what that says. And so we did that.

The good. Yeah, the good news with that just, by the way, is that

that came back a step lower than cirrhosis. That came back

saying I had maybe like level three as opposed to four,

which still bad, but not really on the edge of liver

failure, which I was thought it might be for a few weeks.

Right. Wow. Well, thanks for connecting the dots. And so,

yeah, bring us to the day of heart surgery. Like, this is just

amazing. So here you are in Portland. Yeah, so I would. So I

drove back. So Portland's about four and a half hour drive from where I live.

I went up and back to Portland probably six

times in, you know, a few months to meet with

the first with the cardiologist, then with the surgeon,

then with the surgeon again. I was a little afraid

to have the surgery at ohsu because

pericardiectomies are very rare or somewhat

rare. So even at a place like ohsu where

they do heart transplants, they only do a handful of

pericardiectomies a year. So I was looking

to, I was talking to the Mayo Clinic, I was

talking to the Cleveland Clinic. These places do

them on a regular basis. This would require me to get

different insurance. So I was going to have to wait till the, after

the beginning of the year after my catheterization,

which was in November, they called

me somewhere around Thanksgiving and said,

you know, surgery, we're scheduling you for surgery on the 12th of

December, which was like two weeks away, you know, a little more than two weeks

away. And, and I had been investigating these other

path. So I really, I was a little nervous. But on the way

to. From my last consult with Dr. Tobias,

who was my surgery surgeon, I talked to another

doctor, Dr. Greason at the, at the Mayo Clinic, who

is like one of the foremost surgeons for this type of surgery

in the country. And he was very kind, very generous with his time

and, and, you know, led me to understand,

after peppering him with as many questions as I could, that I

was going to be okay at OHSU with, with this doctor.

And then that was, that was just a week before

the surgery. I met with that doctor again, asked him a few more questions,

and then we were a go for surgery. The same year that

I had the cardioversion

to start with. Luckily for me, this, you know,

from an insurance point of view, I had already reached my out of pocket maximum.

This surgery was now going to be paid for. And then it was just

preparing for surgery. And, and I had already been doing that a bit by

listening to your podcast, which I found extremely helpful to,

you know, to, to listen to other people's stories, your

story, and understand how people prepare and

what could happen afterwards. Some of which on your story

was, was concerning and, you know, the wires

is what. Is what comes to mind, having to

have those taken out. And then I also downloaded

these on the request of my stepmother who was

with my father at that Dr. Oz surgery. She told me about

these guided meditations. I'll have to

look up that one's name. But I did these guided meditations

about, you know, the week or two before

the surgery, which just were all about getting the nervous

system to relax, to trust the

surgery and the surgical team. Her name is Bella Ruth.

Oh, yep. I use Bella Ruth Nappersteck as well. She's quite the name.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were, those were really

profound for some people. Might be a little New agey

sounding and it's very soothing kind of thing. But from. I found that to

be quite remarkable. I went into the

surgery as calm as I could possibly be. I

really had. I surrendered to the whole thing, which is

a practice that I, you know, work with people on in my, in my own

coaching practice, which is radical acceptance and

surrender, which is just recognizing this is happening now

I can either resist it, you know, and suffer, or

I can let go into it and, you know, let

my body handle it. Yeah. So that, that

led up to the 12th of December in 2023, which is

when I had seven hour surgery and I was on the five

hours. Yeah, they got to go in there

and scrape this thing off piece by piece all around your

heart, you know. You know, what I'm envisioning right now

is like a raw egg and

the surgeon's trying to chip away at just the shell because you say it

was so calcified and then the yolk is your heart.

That's exactly it. That's exactly it. So when.

So on the heart by heart lung bypass machine, you know, the heart stops

so it's easier to do that. But obviously there's dangers being on the heart

bypass machine. And that was some of the stuff I was very concerned about because

yeah, there's post surgical issues with

cognitive pump head. They call it pump head.

Okay. Yeah. So I was afraid of all of that and it went

off without a hitch, I guess. And you know, here I am,

obviously to tell the story, dude, seven

hours. I think seven hours. Besides my dad,

my dad's quintuple bypass was eight hours. And I think

you're now my like, yeah, you're. You win number number two

for, sorry, really long heart surgeries. Geez.

I just, I'm just taking a minute to take all that in because it. I

have so many questions, but it's just a lot to take in.

Thank you to your liver for letting us know that you needed

help for sure. And thank you to that amazing hepatologist that

helped you connect the dots. And thank you to you who was

incessant in asking questions and not

accepting, you know, these answers that didn't resonate with

you. And I think that's a really big.

I'm taking so much away from our conversation today already. But

that's. That just continues to drive home for me and

hopefully those listening that like our intuitions are

everything. We are in the driver's seat of our health

care and if something doesn't feel right, we have

the right to continue to pursue

other avenues. And that's what you did, thankfully. A hundred

percent. Yeah, 100%. And. And from this

experience, I recognize the, you know, the dislocated nature

of our healthcare system. Unless you're in like a managed care facility

of some kind like Kaiser back in California, you have

to make some leaps sometimes between, you know, your

local person and a specialist and then maybe,

you know, a distant hospital, and that's on

you. Basically. They'll make a referral, but that will just get lost

a lot of times. And so pushing through the medical

system gently but firmly and calling back and

calling back and calling back, and you think you might be bothering people,

but they're busy and they need to. They need to realize

that, that you need help and you could slip

through their cracks. And it's really, really important. I would just, for

anybody listening to push pretty hard when

you know that you need something. Yes. And I had to do the same.

And I'm having flashbacks of

how tiring it was to pick up

the phone when my heart had any. Had hardly any

juice left. I mean, it was so under oxygenated and here I'm

still having to pound the pavement. And, you know, it was

interesting and it doesn't seem like you had this

mindset, but I had to really tune out my

loved ones who said, just be patient. Wait, let them

come to you. And I was like, no, I can tell

I don't have much time left. And it's

hard to find the courage, but you have

to. To tune out what? We've kind of been

conditioned to believe that we aren't allowed to be in the driver's

seat, that we aren't allowed to be the squeaky wheel. But you're right.

I mean, especially in today's health care system. Post

Covid. Yeah, everyone's tired, everything's

understaffed. So it really is on us

to. To be in the driver's seat and get us to where

we need to go. There's a difference between, you know, being

a hypochondriac and then not knowing what you're really

need and not knowing what's going on. But when you know

that, that you have something going on, you need the help.

You know, driving towards that. That help is, Is

everything. Yes. Yes. So in the moments

we have left, we, you, you're, you're.

Obviously you made it through your surgery. And

what date was your surgery? It was December 12,

2023. Okay. Yeah. It was about six. Six weeks later,

driving up to Ohsu to meet with the cardiologists when I

decided that I would start Training for the Mount Ashland Hill

climb. This half marathon thaw up a mile

from my town to the top of Mount Ashland. Because I hadn't been.

Nobody called me from cardiac, you know, physical therapy or

whatever they call that. I forget. Cardiac rehab.

Cardiac rehab. We tried a bunch of times to get in touch with them and

I just couldn't. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to do my

own cardiac rehab and I'm going to do this thing

because I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it again if I

don't do it now. And you know, that started,

started this, this sensation and the feeling of, of time

and life being very, very precious and, you know,

to, to really decide what you want to do, what I want

to do and not let fear and,

you know, disbelief get in the way of me doing, doing things.

So I started training for this, this thing that I would do

six months after surgery, which I didn't know if I could actually do or would

actually make it. But I started running in the dark

and the cold in February. And you know, at 6:00 in the morning, I would

go out to a track and walk around, you

know, halfway around, stop or whatever and eventually

maybe jog around a little bit, you know, eventually,

week by week, day by day, working up to, to this

big summiting of this mountain in four hours from the bottom,

from the, from our town to the top of this mountain. It was quite, quite

the experience. And so you did it, you, you did the half

marathon? I did that, yeah. January, I mean, on June

8, which was my daughter's birthday, she wasn't happy about that at all, but she

met me up to, at the top and did the last, the last

mile, which is the steepest mile up the ski mountain to Mount

Ashland. And yeah, I did that. And

I'm continuing to run and I get up in the morning still.

Now it's getting dark again, doing, running in the dark. And that was one

of the things I could never do before the surgery that I didn't

know why I could never run long

distances. And now I can do 4, 8, 10, 12

miles without thinking about it too much. A whole new lease on

life. It's like your heart has so much room now. It's just like,

yes, it's totally. And I really felt that for

a while, really. And I can still feel like I can most

of the time feel my heart beating into my chest just because

it has so much room now to

expand. How has this changed you? Spiritually well, it

has definitely given me this sense

of the preciousness of life. Right. It's really

just I had, you know, I worked on this

myself in the past. I think about death

maybe more than the average person. You know, I work in health care.

My friend died of cancer last year.

It has brought me even more into the

present, into the present moment. And

it's as though I feel like a demand on my

system, you know, for whatever. Whatever it is that wants to be

expressed as me, through me in this life is

much clearer and definitely feels demanding about

it. So there's more of me that I'm getting out of the

way and allowing this to, to come through as clearly as

possible. So it's like this open heart surgery is

brought clarity. It opened my heart, you know, in a certain

way. You know, my heart was always the guiding

source for me, you know, when I had those skip beats, you know, 25 years

ago or whatever, and always feeling into my heart to try to understand

what it is that I want. And my heart was constricted,

literally constricted. Right. And so what was that doing to me

psychologically, what was that doing to me spiritually? It's hard to

exactly say, but there's definitely this sense of, of

unburdenedness and openness

and possibility. And like I said, there's this kind of

sense that some, you know, everything that I've thought about

wanting to do or, you know, whether it's with work or with

life or, you know, the community, like I, I gotta

do, because there's not infinite amount of time

here. What's one piece of advice

you want to give to heart patients coming after you? Well, I would

definitely say, you know, bottom line is we should all be regulating

our nervous systems, you know, really, really understanding

and working with this part of us that is

deciding for us really whether we're safe or whether

we're in danger and trying to get past a lot of

what we experience as danger, which really isn't, you know, and,

and then, and then being able over time with some

regulation, with some strengthening, to be able to actually deal with the

actual danger when it comes. Right. So that you don't overdo

it. Most people, I notice,

are overreacting in their lives to

the just incredible amount of stimulus coming in into our

systems every single day. All the information, you know, all the issues

around politics or world issues and

wars and, you know, down to our bank accounts

and paying rent and, you know, dealing with our loved

ones. Right. All of this stuff creates this sense that we're in

danger and our, we're, our nervous systems are hyped up

too, too often for too long. And so getting ourselves to

relax, to learn how to breathe properly, to strengthen our

bodies and to, to be able to root in, in a sense of,

of, of peace and ease will

help any of us not become hard patients, number one. And then if

you are a heart patient, help, help soothe and heal.

And when we relax, when we get that nervous system to relax, that's when our

body repairs itself and our, our body and mind can

connect and rejuvenate. Beautiful.

And how do we find you? How can

listeners find you? Because you help people with this. Yeah. So I

work directly with people on this. You can go directly to my website,

jeremyrothenberg.com I also have a channel on

Insight Timer. I teach meditation, lead meditations. So

I think that's insidetimer.com Jeremy Rothenberg and

we can include, I guess links. I'll have all that in the show notes for

listeners. Great. Yeah. So I offer people free

coaching sessions when they're available and we can have

a 30 minute talk about what's going on for you and give you some free

coaching and see what's available for you.

Wow. Incredible. I hope listeners will take you up on that because

you are just an absolute joy to speak with and, and I

so appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable and

be seen, be heard and share your story because none

of us have to go through this alone. And I know that

your story of hope, inspiration and healing will help many others.

So thank you, Jeremy. Thank you so much. It's great talking to you. I really

enjoyed it and you've heard it here. You will find Jeremy

Rothenberg in the show Notes. Please do consider reaching out

to him. And if you have never used Insight Timer, I

love it. It is such a great tool

and there are so many different like options on there to

listen to Jeremy. They have just like singing bowls

and I don't know, it's like all kinds of bells and whistles that can help

us through kind of the interesting time we find ourselves in here on

planet Earth. So thank you so much for joining. Joining

us today with open heart surgery with boots. Please be sure to come back next

week. I've got another episode queued up for you.

I know you're going to love it. Until then, I love you.

Your heart is your best friend.