231: Plot Twist: How Healing Your Body with Just Your Mind May Be More Possible Than You Think with Kelly Noonan Gores, Director of HEAL

In this special "Plot Twist" episode of The Light Watkins Show, Light Watkins revisits a pivotal moment from a past conversation with Kelly Noonan Gores, the creator and director of the acclaimed documentary HEAL. Kelly shares the inspiring story of how her deep curiosity and a life-changing discovery led her to follow her heart and pursue a dream she had been nurturing for over a decade.

In this bite-sized episode, listeners will hear how Kelly, who had no prior experience directing a film, was moved to investigate the incredible stories of people who healed themselves using the power of their minds. The spark that ignited her journey was reading about a woman who healed herself of stage four cancer—a story so compelling that Kelly felt an undeniable pull to create a documentary to explore the connection between mind and body in healing.

Light and Kelly discuss the challenges she faced along the way, including self-doubt, the fear of failure, and navigating the complexities of the film industry. Kelly also reflects on the importance of trusting your intuition, following what excites you, and embracing the unexpected twists and turns that life presents.

This episode is perfect for anyone seeking inspiration to follow their passion, especially when the path forward is unclear. Whether you're a creative professional, an entrepreneur, or simply someone looking to make a meaningful change in your life, Kelly’s story will remind you that sometimes the biggest leaps of faith start with a single step in the direction of your dreams.

And if you’re curious about what was Kelly's diagnosis and how she was able to heal from it, click here. 

Transcript

KNG: “So, I read her book and I was like, her story to me is so fascinating and she's the poster child of Heal. She had stage four cancer lymphoma, and she had lemon-sized tumors from her neck, all the way down to her abdomen coming out of her skin. She had done Western medicine she had done Eastern medicine she was a Hindu woman that was raised in Hong Kong. So she was in both of these worlds. She tried everything. She had lost her best friend to cancer and she went into a coma. Her organs were shutting down. There's no way that any human would look at this physical body and say it could recover. It was just so far gone. In that coma, she had a near death experience. And within weeks, there was no more cancer in her body. And she goes around the world talking about it now.”

 [INTRODUCTION]

Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I’m Light Watkins, and I have conversations with ordinary folks, just like you and me, who’ve taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or what they’ve identified as their mission in life. 

Today, we have a bite-sized “Plot Twist” episode. A plot twist is a shorter clip from a past episode, where the guest shares the story of the pivotal moment in their life trajectory where they found the gateway to their calling. And the idea behind sharing their plot twists is to inspire you to lean in to those plot twists when they happen in your life. 

Because usually, when you get turned around from what you thought was your path in life, what’s actually happening is you’re being detoured toward your actual path. 

And sometimes that looks like getting laid off, or being betrayed, or in the case of today’s guest, the creator and director of the documentary HEAL, Kelly Noonan Gores, it was being captured by this idea of investigating people who’ve healed themselves with their mind, and making a documentary about it. Truth be told, she had been incubating the idea for 10 years, but it got to a point where read an incredible story of a woman who had healed herself of stage four cancer with lemon sized tumors all over her torso. And Kelly was so inspired that she said enough is enough, I have to take the leap. She was told by one of her mentors, don’t worry about the how. Just start moving in the direction of your vision, and it will slowly come together. So Kelly put together a deck, etc, all the while, not knowing how it was going to happen, but trusting that if she kept moving forward, it would all work out--even though this was her first time directing anything. Of course, Kelly had to navigate some unanticipated twists and turns, but hey, that’s why it’s called a plot twist.

Let’s listen in…

LW: When I'm talking to people on this podcast, about their journey, a lot of times something really bad happens in order to kind of cause them to pivot away from seeking that conventional idea of success into following their heart, taking leaps of faith and finding their purpose and all of that. And so yeah, that's one way to do it.

But then another way, some people are just really curious. They have some experiences, it opens up some unlocked curiosity within and they just keep following that, and that was actually my experience. I had a great family life, a great great upbringing. It wasn't perfect, obviously. But when I came across a few books that gave me language for all the things that I was feeling, coming from a very Christian background and kind of now opening my eyes to the spiritual realm. I was so excited. I just could not get enough of it. I was at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore on Melrose, all the time. I was at Agape all the time. We met in yoga class. So then I guess, that was your experience as well, right? You didn't come from some deep dark, rock bottom, dark night of the soul moment.

KNG: No, exactly. Thankfully so, I think. But totally, curiosity and this like combination between this just knowing that sparked, you know, “I want to know more. This resonates so deeply.” Resonate is such a spiritual community word that people say, but it's like, there's no other way to describe it. It's just like this knowing that what you're reading feels so truthful to you. It doesn't matter if it feels truthful to anybody else, it feels truthful to you, and then it compels you to start doing things that continue to improve your physical experience.

LW: Yeah. And the other thing you learn is that not everybody resonates with that, because obviously, you're excited, you're talking about it a lot, you're making references to these things, manifesting and affirming and all of that. People start rolling their eyes. I'm sure when you talk to Marty about it, he is probably happy for you as his daughter, but he probably didn't really buy into it. I'm imagining. I don't know. How did you come to terms with the safest places that you could talk about or do you just not care?

KNG: Yeah, again, in my hyper vigilance, I would determine if someone was open to talking about it, and I would talk about it with them. For me, who doesn't like confrontation and drama, I avoided talking about it with people that I just didn't – you kind of just know. Interestingly, around that same time, I started paying attention, and I think I learned this from Reverend Michael, but I would have a conversation with you or anybody else and I'd be talking about these things and I would just light up and I would feel this surge of energy in my body. And he's like, “Follow that. Follow what makes you excited to talk about.” And I could talk about these concepts of quantum physics and energy and manifestation and subconscious mind and what happens after death and all these things, I would just want to talk about for hours.

 And then juxtapose that to like, I booked a film, and was carrying the film, which is like what I had been striving for my whole life. And every day I would wake up, I would be drained. I didn't want to sit in the makeup chair two hours every morning, memorizing my lines. It was very stressful for me, because I had this pressure on myself that I had to do it right. And I was like, “Meryl Streep doesn't have this stress, which is why she's amazing. I don't know that I should be an actor, because I'm way too in my head and subconscious and beating myself up all the time.” I just had this awareness like I need to follow what gives me energy and let go of something that is no longer feeding me that curiosity and passion.

LW: Were you forging relationships with these people who you admired, like the Beckwiths, like the Liptons, and others who were in that more metaphysical field at that time?

KNG: No. Until I started, actually, like pursuing the beginning of making Heal, I had put on a pedestal all of these people and didn't feel worthy of having conversations. I was very shy in that way. This was like that weird push-pull of this whole acting thing. I'd love to be the star of the commercial and acting on it. But I was just connecting to humans outside of that and making new relationships. I was always very shy. That didn't come easy for me. I was uncomfortable starting these conversations and meeting new people. I would like take a class from Michael, but I wouldn't connect with him after, or feel worthy of asking him a question, you know, which is just so interesting to think about.

LW: So when you decided to finally put this deck for your documentary together, what happened just before that? Why that time, as opposed, you said, you've been germinating on this idea for 10 years. So, why that time in your life did you decide now is the time to finally take the first step?

KNG: Yeah. So, I had gone so far as to hire my friend as a producer because I was getting closer and I started, I said, if I don't hire someone and start paying them, kind of like what you did with finishing your book, The Deadline, that I would just maybe be scared because of the shyness I have and this feeling of fear of failure, I’d keep kicking this can down the road. So, I hired her for about a year and we would meet and do research together. Ironically, all the research that she did it was like, didn't end up pushing the film forward. It was just holding me accountable.

The real last straw that got me to this place where I just knew I was ready and I knew that I had to make this film was reading Anita Moorjani’s story Dying To Be Me. I really wanted Wayne Dyer in my film. So, I was listening to something he was doing and he mentioned this Anita Moorjani woman. So, I read her book, and I was like, her story to me is so fascinating, and she's the poster child of Heal. I mean, she basically – to keep it short, she had stage four cancer lymphoma and she had lemon sized tumors from her neck all the way down to her abdomen, coming out of her skin. She had done Western medicine, she had done Eastern medicine. She was a Hindu woman that was raised in Hong Kong. So, she was in both of these worlds. She tried everything. She had lost her best friend to cancer. And she went into a coma, her organs were shutting down, there's no way that any human would look at this physical body and say it could recover. It was just so far gone.

In that coma, she had a near death experience. She went into the other realm and experienced that magnanimous love that many people describe on the other side. And she said, “Time was no longer linear. Everything was happening at once.” She encountered the essence of her father, who, in life, they had a very tumultuous relationship because he was very strict Hindu, and she had been westernized in Hong Kong and she kind of went away from the religion and didn't have the arranged marriage and really disappointed her father. In that moment of being with his essence, and communicating telepathically, or just in the knowing, there was no judgment. There was just pure, unconditional, this love that she couldn't describe. In that moment, in their conversation and exchange of information, she realized that every decision she had made in her life was driven by fear, and that's why she ended up with the cancer. Her dad basically said, “You should go back to your body. You're not done with your work on earth.” And she's like, “I want to stay here. This feels fantastic.”

But in that moment, she knew if she went back to her body, she would heal with this new knowing that it's that fear, love thing. Now, she no longer had to fear death, because she knows that we just go back to where we came from, pure love, and there's still the essence of who we are, whatever. So, she had this shift in consciousness, came back into her body, recounted things that she would not possibly have been able to know in her coma, that shocked the doctors. And within weeks, there was no more cancer in her body and she goes around the world talking about it now. So, I read that story. And I was like, “Okay, that's it. I'm ready to do it.” And that was kind of the last straw. But it was just this knowing, I was finally ready. Let's do this.

LW: I'm not as familiar with her story. But was it just the awareness that life continues on beyond body death that she created it with healing her body? Or did she do something different when she came back out of the coma?

KNG: Yeah, I think that experience of deep connection and oneness. She didn’t have a body on the other side. She was so connected to her father's essence and it was only love, there was no judgment. So, she said it was just this clarity, that we forget that when we're in these bodies, and seemingly separate. But we are all connected, we are all one. We're made from this divine love and that's where we're going back to, so basic human ego fears just dissolved. They no longer existed because this experience she had was so powerful. So, it causes like, just a permanent shift in her perception of life and there was nothing else to fear. I asked her, when I interviewed her, I said, “Do you ever fear anything? Like is there anything you ever fear now? Do you fall back into the old days?” She says, “Maybe momentarily, but I have the awareness now to go, “Oh, that's not me. That's my ego. That's an old pattern or the energy in the room or whatever.” So I'm like, “How can we all get that shift in consciousness without having to have a near death experience?”

LW: Alright, so you're going to do a film. Does it have a title yet? Is it called Heal at this point when you’re putting it together? Or is it just like, documentary about people who get better?

KNG: This is a great question. If I recall correctly, I think we came up with the name Heal, I'm picturing it on the deck, I think that it had an actual title that's sending it out to people.

LW: Okay, so you got to find people who are going through a healing journey or who have gone through a healing journey. You also have to find experts to talk about this and you know, now we've had What the Bleep, we've had The Secret, we've had other documentaries so I'm imagining people like Deepak Chopra and Bruce Lipton, they’re probably getting hit up thousands times a day for everybody and their mother wants to do a documentary and have them come in give commentary. So, what was the plan to get these people's attention?

KNG: Exactly.

LW: And find these people who are going through this healing journey?

KNG: Totally. I had the awareness, I was just like, there was such a strong calling for me to do this, that I'm just going to surrender and go, “I have no idea what I'm doing. I've no idea how this is all going to come together.” But I'd been to Agape enough times where Michael is just like, “Get out of the way. Let go and let God.” So, I really had that kind of understanding that it was unfolding, and it was going to unfold, and I just had to keep one foot in front of the other.

So, I started by going to a Celebrate Your Life Conference, because a bunch of these people, a bunch of these teachers that were in The Secret and books that I read, like Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, Darren Weissman, Joe Dispenza, Marianne Williamson, Sue Morter, Joan Borysenko, all of these people that I wanted in the film, were at this conference.

 LW: How did you find out about the conference?

KNG: I don't know. I don't know how I found out.

 LW: Were you looking for a conference where everyone is going to be in one place at one time?

KNG: I think it was part of that whole period in my life. I was just like so hungry to – I was in it. I wanted to know more now that I had gotten a taste. I'll tell you, because you asked before. After I watched The Secret, one of the things that I really implemented in my life was gratitude journaling. I think it was Bob Proctor in the film, but he was all about writing down because I've been journaling since I was little, like writing as a medium of mind for just creative expression, or whatever. So he would say, “Write what you're grateful for as if you already had them, or as if they had already happened.” So, I just everyday wrote in my journal, “I'm so happy and grateful now that that…” That was his directive.

So, I started doing this and it was basically about qualities that I wanted, that I'm obviously financially free, that I can see a masseuse once a week, like just different qualities of life that I wanted. He said, “Don't worry about the how. The how is going to trip you up. Just focus on what you want, and feel the feelings of already having them.” So, I do that every day. And literally three months later, I was still waiting tables three times a week and within three months, I booked this job that I didn't even know existed. It was a fit model for Guess jeans and I went from going paycheck to paycheck to working like, a few hours a week, every day, like four days a week, four hours a day and making over $100,000. I was like, “Oh my God, The Secret really works.”

So, that hooked me and I still have a gratitude journal, to this day. Meditation is my lifeblood. But I started to do gratitude work around it. But then I found that I was just so into these talks at Celebrate Your Life Conference and I just got so inspired, and Heal was coming together in my mind. But I would have to connect with these people, which is I was so – my heart was racing. And they would have these book signings after their talks. I brought my producer friend, Rochelle, with me. She was great. She really encouraged me and gave me confidence to connect with these people. But I was so uncomfortable.

So, I'd wait in line to have them sign my book and then I'd be like, turn bright red and be like, “I'm doing this film.” They'd give me their card and then I would follow up and a lot of them said yes. Andrew Weil said no, Dr. Josh Axe said no, those are two people that I pursued, said no, but most people said yes. I randomly had this connection to Deepak Chopra and I met with him and he said, “Explain to me what you're doing.” And he said, “Great, I'll do it.”

LW: All you need is like one, right? And then Deepak Chopra is doing it, and so and so it's doing it and everyone else is like, “Okay, well, Deepak is doing it.” So, when you're at this conference, do you have the deck in your back pocket? I know you have a wonderful smile and presence and all of that. But did you have anything more than that? Or were you literally just pitching them within 20 seconds of – because I'm sure there's a whole line of people behind you wanting to get their book signed, and probably have a handler saying, “Come on, keep it going. Keep it going.” And then you're there trying to pitch your little idea. What did you have to say or leave to them? What was your pitch?

 KNG: Yeah. We were in the digital age. So, I gave him like a 20 second pitch because I knew – I’m very, again, hyper vigilant. I don't want to piss anyone off in line. I don't want to get in trouble by the handler. So, I'm just like – and then they would say, “Oh, that sounds interesting. Here, take my assistant’s card, or here's my card or whatever.” And then I just followed up with a short brief cover letter and the deck. And then of course when Deepak said yes, I was like, “And Deepak Chopra is involved.” So, that made it like flow a lot better.

 LW: How developed was the project beyond just having a deck and a friend of yours who was going to be the producer?

KNG: That was it.

LW: You didn’t have a start date, you didn’t have any other information to give to them?

KNG: No, I said it was financed, because my husband graciously assured me that we would be able to do this. And so, they just want to know that it's financed. That's the hardest part of filmmaking. Nobody really asks the budget. I think at that point, all of those people, what I found is that they just go with their intuition and their gut. They're pretty well connected. So, they feel into it. They liked my energy and they then saw as more people were signing on, and it's kind of a small community. It was like, Bruce, Greg, Joe. They all know each other. So, if they all decide to do it, or they all talk about it and feel good about it, it’s like, “Let's do it.” So, it was cool that way.

LW: Is there an exchange? Do you have to pay people to be in a documentary like that or what do they get out of it?

KNG: Great question. Documentaries, I don't think legally you can pay someone to appear in them because they're supposed to be – perhaps you can. But the spirit of a documentary is that it's supposed to be not incentivized or subjectify it in any way. You're just supposed to get to the facts, truth. So, we didn't pay anybody. They just all volunteered their time. And like I said, they're at this point in their life where they just want to share their teachings and they hope that – a few of them were concerned, actually, only one person was concerned, and she was a scientist and a researcher and she either had been in a film before and they took her out of context and presented her in a way that she was very affronted by and so she was terrified that that was going to happen again. So, we had a lot of legal contracts around that, making sure I didn't – she gets final approval of her interview and everything like that. But everybody else just kind of trusted.

LW: What about the fact that you've never shot a documentary before 

KNG: Again, you should ask these people.

LW: Were you reading Documentary Making for Dummies at night while you were reaching out to these people during the day?

KNG: Totally. You do. You have to fake it until you make it. But I had been on sets my whole life. And like I said, in the teepee play pretend game of Lost, I kind of naturally liked that role of director. So, I was nervous about the technical side of things. I was trying to educate myself on the technical direction, because I wanted to seem like I knew what I was doing when I had these big names on my set. But as far as creative directing, I had full confidence that I could learn as I go and I surrounded myself with people that I felt had enough experience that they could hold my hand through the process.

LW: So, let's cut to day one. What was that like for you?

KNG: Sweaty. I was nervous. And it was so funny because I'm all about nature, and I just envisioned this beautiful documentary that was going to be kind of a healing experience as you watched it. So, it's going to be these beautiful scenes and the interviews will be outdoors and you'd see these elements of nature within the interviews. And so we shot, Darren Weissman was our first interview. We were shooting with three cameras, three angles, and it was just like, outside so that we had to stop when the wind came. There are helicopters that like fly over my house for tourism. It's like it was a disaster. But Darren was so gracious and we ended up reshooting his interview, because there were so many hiccups, and it was kind of the training wheels day. I learned so much what not to do going forward that we went back and shot his interview months later, because he was kind enough to do so.

LW: Was that just a fluke? Or was that like, if someone was an experienced documentary filmmaker, would they have known all those little things that got you kind of tripped up on that first day? Like, don't shoot outside. Don't start at this time.

KNG: Yeah, and they would have been more prepared and not play around with cameras and what you wanted on the day of the talent showing up, you would have actually rehearsed and figured out your shots beforehand in a professional manner. But for whatever the reason my whole life, I've been a procrastinator. I work well under pressure. So, that's just the way that I've functioned, and now in hindsight, yeah, I should have been way more methodical in my preparation. Sometimes it's a benefit. I used to just cram for tests the night before and ace them and not retain any of the knowledge. So, yeah, in hindsight, I think it was just my lack of preparation and planning.

LW: Okay, and then where do you find people going through a healing journey? So I know you've mentioned that you didn't just want people who had already healed, you actually wanted people who were going through in real time, which is, I guess, much riskier as a documentary filmmaker, because you don't know what the timeline is going to be, right? Where do you find those people and what were some of the challenges of documenting their journey?

KNG: I had this lofty idea that like, “I'm going to start and finish this documentary in one year's time,” because there was a circumstances in my life that like, I had, like a short window to complete this thing, which is so funny, because you don't – when you're doing a documentary, you don't know, especially following real people on healing journeys, you have no idea the timeline and the length of time it's going to take to watch this all unfold. Most documentaries are shot over a span of five to seven years, or a lot of them, I don't know if most is accurate. I had this idea, I wanted to find a veteran with PTSD, and see how meditation could help them and perhaps psychedelics. I really just wanted to highlight that community because so many are in need of healing.

The veteran thing just was so hard to connect to, it was so interesting. They're everywhere, there's so many, especially even in Los Angeles, just right down on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. But at the time, we just didn't align with the right story or the right person, because it wasn't obviously meant to be. But in the journey, we found different people in that search for the veteran. Ironically, while I was searching for the veteran, my friend, who works at my husband's office and is the notary public, came to our house to have us sign some documents for a property or something that we both had to sign. She handed over the papers and I noticed on her hand, I didn't even barely notice, but she was like, “Oh, I'm so sorry about my rashes. I just had this thing.” Again, me being the shy, not really easy to connect person, I would never normally pry and ask further about that. I'd be like, “Oh, my God, don't worry about it.” And then I'd sign the papers and move on.

Well, I had this nudge to be curious and ask more. And so I asked her, “What's going on?” And so she told me about this whole mystery illness, and she ended up being in the film, because I was like, “Wow, this is fascinating and also, I really want to help you. Do you mind, you know, I’m making this documentary? I know a lot of people in different modalities, do you mind if I just document us trying to get to the bottom of your illness that’s been a mystery for five years that you've been dealing with?” And she's like, she thought about it and she said, “Yeah, let's do it.” So, she was really courageous in letting me follow her. She was very private, too.

And then, the other one is Elizabeth, because there's been other documentaries done about healing and this sort of thing. But they were all just talking heads, interviews, speaking in hindsight about their illness, and I wanted to see the real feelings that you go through, because intellectually, everything I talk about in the film makes sense. But you put on the fear and the stress and finances and the fear of a diagnosis, you can't quite capture that, unless you're experiencing that with the person. So, I wanted to be conscious of that. So, we aligned with this woman who was a spiritual psychologist who had worked with a woman with stage four cancer, and had documented the whole thing and wanted to make a documentary about it. So essentially, we just hooked up with her and licensed her footage, because she had already completed a lot of what I was looking for. So, that one year process that I had this lofty goal of achieving just was made possible through the fact that we aligned with two people willing to be a part of our project, and I just licensed a lot of her footage that she already had.

 LW: Did you have a certain number of cases in mind that you thought would make for a proper documentary? Like, “I need to have 10 people going through a healing journey,” and if so, was it difficult to find that many people? Because like you say, if you're going through it, it's not usually something you want to announce to the world, from battling with X, Y, and Z. So, how did that all play out?

 KNG: Yeah, I had the trinity, the trifecta number in my head. I thought three was enough to where we could go deep, but would give us enough variety and again, I was thinking cancer because it's so rampant today. I was thinking a veteran with PTSD and mental health issues. And then I was thinking of a child with perhaps autism or something else. So, we ended up finding this child with autism whose mom really helped him heal through diet and food. So, that was really cool and we filmed his story, and his story is still in progress. But we ended up like at the end of the filming process, it was just too much. It ended up being actually too much to even follow three stories. So, we ended up not using the kid’s story in the film and that was a choice we made. We made it into a short film that we gave to the mom later to use as she wanted. And her story was very much about physical nutrition, which is interesting, but when we looked at the scope of the footage we had in the interviews, and what was coming forward most powerfully was all about belief systems and forgiveness and the spiritual and emotional aspects of it.

 LW: That being the premise like, okay, your belief system impacts or influences how your body responds to the environment, was it hard to maintain integrity around that, because you don't know what these people's healing journey is going to encompass? And obviously, you want to show things that are going to support your hypothesis that yes, your belief is huge when it comes to this. But how challenging was that? But did you find yourself suggesting to some of these people that, “Wll, try making affirmations or things like that,” so you could film it, and it could support what you guys were talking about in the commentary?

KNG: What are you suggesting? Yeah. I was definitely trying to be very sensitive to everybody's process, and also be aware of my judgments and wishes and desires that I may perhaps be imposing on someone else. What I thought was so interesting about the woman with cancer who we followed, I thought her story was very compelling, because she “did everything right” and she kind of looks like me. She's like a thin, tall, blonde, who did yoga, studied acupuncture, did green juices, like she's very much LA yoga community. And yet, she woke up one day with stage four anal cancer. That was terrifying and so intriguing to me, because I'm like, “Whoa, I feel like I'm the pillar of help and I'm very aware.” But she's an example that I could wake up with something growing beneath the surface. I wanted to find out more.

Also, we filmed a bunch of other people. I had this energy healer do a group healing with people from all walks of life who had different diseases that we didn't even know what they were. We knew they wanted to show up for this energy healing session. So, there were times when, and one of them was a family member, actually, and there's times when – and you kind of hinted at this question before, people that don't necessarily resonate with the same things you do, how do you converse with them? What I had to learn, because I genuinely want to help people, but you can't impose your beliefs on them. So, I just tried to not lean in and force but just offer up kind of a tray of options and encourage them to explore what felt best for them. And then there's just a certain point where you just have to let people have their journey, even though you have an intuition about what might be at the root, and you feel like they have a major blind spot, or whatever. It's like, you just have to allow people to have their journey and hold space with love and not impose your beliefs on them.

LW: So, speaking of diagnoses, you were diagnosed with something during, I think it was the deck writing phase, or maybe the beginning of your shooting. Can you talk about that experience and how that played a role in your sensitivity with the subjects going forward?

KNG: Yeah, in the preparation phase, when I was finally kind of ready to do the film, or maybe even like a year before that, I had gotten a new doctor for my husband, because obviously I had been researching all of these things and he was in a very conventional kind of concierge doctor cycle, where he had acid reflux and they’d give him the pill and he was taking more pills than I thought he needed to because he's very healthy, but he's just not educated. He's super busy, and he's just going to trust his doctor. So, as I started learning more and more, I said, “Maybe we should find a more integrative doctor.” So, we got connected to this wonderful doctor who used to be a cardiologist, and now is like an integrative internist and we did all the blood tests and got him off some of the meds and then we were just trying to do some new lifestyle interventions to eventually get him off all meds. While he was doing his blood test, I was like, “Well, let's just test all my blood because maybe there's a food sensitivity and maybe there's some minor tweaks we can do and I can be a little bit more vital and optimal.” A week later, we get the labs back and the doctor is like, I need you to come in and see me in my office. I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I go, “Is this about Alec?” And he's like, “No, no, it's about you.” I'm like, “Oh, that's even more interesting.”

[END]

That was director Kelly Noonan Gores, and to see what her diagnosis was when she was called into the doctor, you wanna go to episode 58, and start at the 55:13 minute mark. It’s a great story, and in addition to listening to rest of it, I recommend following Kelly on the socials at @kellygores and healwithkelly.

If you know anyone whose making the world a better place, and they had an incredible plot twist in their life, email me your guest suggestions at light@lightwatkins.com. 

My other ask is that you take a few seconds to leave a rating or review for the show. You hear podcast hosts like me ask listeners like you for ratings, because that’s how guests determine if they’re going to come onto a podcast. So it makes a huge difference. And all you do is look at your device, click on the show name, scroll past the first five episodes, and you'll see a place with five blank stars—just tap the star all the way on the right to leave a 5-star rating. And if you're feeling generous, leave a quick line about the show, and that can go a long way as well.

Also, you can watch these Plot Twist episodes on my YouTube channel if you prefer see what Arjuna looks like as he’s sharing his plot twist. And don't forget to subscribe on youtube as well. 

Okay, I’ll see you on Wednesday with the next long-form conversation about an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place. And until then, keep trusting your intuition, following your heart, and keep leaning into those Plot Twists in your life. And if no one’s told you lately—I believe in you.

Thank you, and have a fantastic weekend!