Love, Eat, Heal represents the transformational journey of finding ourselves, changing our thoughts, and living better lives. Through mindfulness, self-care, and the power of food for healing, we can create a life that’s truly worth living. In this episode, we sit down with Carole Murko, the founder of Love, Eat, Heal, to discuss her journey of healing and how she helps others transform their lives. Carole shares the inspiration for her company as well as what drives her passion for this work. She talks about the tools she uses to work with others to change their thoughts and heal their lives. She also delves into the state of our minds, souls, hearts, and consciousness and explores the concept of stress versus creation. Carole opens up about her personal journey of healing, from learning techniques like the Wim Hof guided breath work and unlearning old patterns and thoughts. Join us for a powerful conversation on mindfulness, self-care, and the power of food for healing.
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Love, Eat, Heal: The Process Of Changing Our Thoughts And Healing Our Lives With Carole Murko
Carole Murko is a master of change. Her path from Wall Street analyst to NPR and PBS Cooking host now to a mindset expert and health and self-mastery coach is what drives her passion for helping others make changes in their lives and enable them to master their thoughts and become the best version of themselves.
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Carole, thank you so much for joining us here. It is great to see you again.
It is fabulous to see you again too. It is always a pleasure to meet aligned and like-minded individuals such as yourself.
I was hoping you could start us off by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.
I’m going to start with what I have called my company, which is called Love. Eat. Heal. That is the best door to understanding how I came to this work. I chose those words consciously. The Love part is to love yourself first. It’s through my journey of leaning into loving myself first and understanding that self-care was something good for me and therefore, I showed up as a better person. That is a tiny window to the love part.
The next part is the Eat part. I have been a big proponent of conscious eating and being conscious in general about what we consume. That includes information. I believe that we digest the universe and everything that is around us. Heal is I believe everybody has something to heal. Heal needs to be healed. It could be something like a little teeny wound you carry from the interaction you had on the playground as a five-year-old that you haven’t created a behavior that you were unconscious of two diseases and other things.
What brought me to creating that is I was cast into my healing journey. I had an autoimmune eye disease that had no known cure. I took on exploring what I deemed Western medicine was failing me because it was an orphan disease, as they call them. It was rare that there was not a lot of research. When you are showing up and they are giving you different drugs, they were like, “Let’s try this and that,” you failed that one.
One day I was meditating, which was one of the tools that I had explored to help me through this process of getting a diagnosis that, in the Western medicine paradigm, had a bad result. I was trying to find tools that would help me heal myself. I started meditating. I was on the beach. I was doing a walking meditation. I had an unpleasant conversation with my doctor. I had this somewhat of a download that said, “You can heal yourself. You have the power within you.”
That is when I started understanding that my thoughts were going to heal me. I was going to align my intention of being whole and healed and the emotion I would feel when I was healed. That emotion is freedom and wholeness. I didn’t learn this out of thin air. I tripped into healers. Once you are put out into the universe, you are ready to heal and the teacher shows up.
The first teacher that showed up for me was like a sledgehammer over my head because he was introduced as a person, not literally but his work, three times over the course of nine months. After the third time, it was like, “I apparently need to know this work.” That was the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza. I dove in full in. I have gotten certified to teach a program called Change Your Mind, Create New Results. My perspective on all this is you teach what you need to learn.
I’m teaching what I deeply need to learn through the process of helping others on their healing journeys or even healing myself more deeply. That is how I got in. I’m passionate about it because I’m a walking example of the work. I can see all my symptoms have gone. I have magic in my life. I don’t even know how to explain it better. I don’t have to push the way I used to. The work works in every aspect of your life. It is not like, “It will help you heal.” It will help you to show up better and be a better partner. It is magic.
What are the pieces or factors in that magic? You have talked about a variety of things in our pre-interview talk. What kinds of tools do you use on an ongoing basis or incorporate into the work you do with others teaching them to change their thoughts to heal their lives?
It starts as simple as understanding that our thoughts create things. There is a formula or a model that we first start with when I work with my clients. It is if you believe your thoughts have anything to do with your destiny and they do. We have 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day and 90% of them are the same thoughts you had yesterday. It makes sense that we’re repeating our life day after day.
Once I lay out that framework, I begin to show them myself. They were like, “What are those thoughts that you come with every day?” We journal. Journaling is a big part. You wake up in the morning. Typically, before I do this work, I would start thinking about my problem or to-do list. In that process, naturally, without me knowing, it put me into a state of stress, which is not the place that we want to be. It creates disharmony in our bodies. We are not creative. It is a maladaptive state of being.
A state of stress creates disharmony in our bodies. It’s not a place we would want to be in. Click To TweetA long time ago, we went into stress or survival because we were living in the woods. Maybe there was a bear that we were running away from. We would go into this process where we would be focused on running, fighting or hiding. That is a state of being that most people live in the modern day. The statistic is about 70% of us live with thoughts that create hormones of stress. I was unconscious. I would wake up and think about these things.
Ninety percent of my clients don’t have the same thoughts as I do but they have the same experience that they were like, “I do wake up and think the weather is gross outside.” Not even understanding even that simple thought about bad weather is a negative thought. That is feeding more negative energy around their words and then stress hormones in their bodies.
We start there. We list out everything awesome about yourself. You would not want to change because we all are awesome. We all have amazing things that we want to take with us when we are in this process. We look at the things that we don’t want to take with us. It could be anything from self-judgment, complaining or any of those types of things. A lot of people know how to identify those things. What I teach them to do is like, “What do you want to replace them with?” That is your target. You want to replace anger or emotion that a lot of people would feel.
Anger is a good one, especially in this culture.
I usually say, “What would be a better alternative to anger? What’s that replacement?” It is not being angry but it is also loving and being kind. I coach them through that process. If you no longer want to have anger about certain things and you want to replace it with kindness and love, every time you feel anger, you got to imagine that you are replacing it with love and kindness. That gives them a target. It is like the GPS.
I teach them what happens in their brain. As you well know that we can prune synaptic connections and create new ones. We are trying to be aware of the ones you no longer want. We are creating a clear intention to create those new synaptic connections. Once we know we no longer want, we create that target.
I teach through the program all kinds of things. We talk about living in stress versus creation, how the brain works and what types of brainwave states we want to get into when we move into meditation. People understand that we have the hardware. We are designed to move out of these undesirable thoughts, feelings and states of being.
Love, Eat, Heal: We actually have the hardware. We were designed to move out of these undesirable thoughts, feelings, and states of being.
We do journaling. Part of journaling is you write down what you are thinking when you wake up in the morning. You write down what you no longer want to think and what you do want to think. You go into meditation. When those negative thoughts might pass by you and your meditation, you are aware of them. You know that you are going to replace them. It is designed so that we make the unconscious conscious.
For some of those negative thoughts, you will get so sick of them. You will never let one slip by you. We are all works in progress. I still catch myself with an old habit or behavior. I had a money conversation with my husband. He got a little testy. My first thing was to go into my old behavior, which was to clam up. I was somebody that clammed up. I nodded, smiled and wouldn’t say anything. I believe that is what ultimately led to my eye disease. I clammed up my whole life. I caught myself and I’m like, “I’m not going to do my old clamming up.” I told them what I thought and how we hopefully couldn’t manage through this as opposed to clamming up. It was a big moment for me because it was uncomfortable.
How long have you been working with this process for yourself with Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work and the idea of recognizing the negative thoughts and reprogramming your mind to go into positive ones? How long have you been actively using that process?
I started learning that process around 2017 and 2018. I became one of his trainers in 2020.
You still haven’t gotten perfect. You still have some negative thoughts and undoing the patterns.
It is because we are all works in progress. The thing is that is the path.
The point I want to make is that I got lucky for fortunate as far as I’m concerned and found a body of work that is very similar in 2004. I have been working with it actively since 2004. I still get triggered and have negative thoughts come up. I still have old patterns that I want to be expressed through me. I’m getting better in the process of catching it after it has happened or stopping it before I act on it. To validate and strengthen the message that it is not throwing a switch. It is traveling through life differently. It is learning a different set of skills and practicing them regularly as I get better at them.
Regularly is important and I will tell you why. I was doing this regularly but I thought, “Everything was going so well. I’m not going to do the journaling part anymore. I’m going to go into meditation and do shorter meditation or try something different.” About a month or so later, everything started to not feel good. Things were not going great. I thought, “What has changed?” I was like, “I stopped doing the work consistently and intentionally.” Another great message is a lot of people think they are eureka. “I’m done.” It is not. Please don’t test it. Please do it. Don’t stop.
Go ahead and stop if you want but observe what the results you get when you are doing this versus that.
There is no judgment in stopping and starting. That is the process of creating a new habit in recognizing the benefits that it produces. It was Malcolm Gladwell who was like, “It takes 10,000 hours to create a solid habit.” What they did was they studied either concert pianists and also athletes. Professional athletes and high-level musicians have over 10,000 hours of practice under their belts. That is why they can show up and perform at that level. Even for us, in wanting to master ourselves and our thoughts, we have to practice and put in the time. There is no easy way around it.
When you talk to him, it is not a hard and fast thing but it is the idea that he was trying to study. How do we get people who are such high performers seem to go above and beyond? He looked at things like the groups of The Beatles, Wayne Gretzky and some other people that are far and away better at their field or have accomplished more in terms of finances. He said, “These factors have merged when you study these people.”
One of them is they got above average skills in that area. They were fortunate enough to have opportunities presented to them. They took advantage of those opportunities. They stepped into the unknown, took advantage of the opportunities and kept working at it until they had amassed that 10,000 hours.
That is why I like to interview people like you if you have gotten a lot of results from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work. I was going through his book, You Are The Placebo. If you stepped into this and taken his training and learned some techniques that are helping you and others, in this conversation, you might say some things that spark some people that wouldn’t normally step into a practice like this to give it a try. Aside from journaling and meditation, what other tools do you use with people?
I teach simple breathwork but I have jumped into the deep end of the pool. I’m a big Wim Hof person. I love the Wim Hof breathing and cold immersion. I don’t teach that.
You use it to great advantage in your life.
I use and recommend it. It is very amazing at self-regulating. The breathwork itself is the most powerful meditation I have ever done. It is a lot of in and out breathing but you do a breath hold retention. That is where the power comes in. It activates your pineal gland. You get to a place where you surrender. That place is where all the unlimited possibilities exist. It is where the unknown and you feel amazing. Cold exposure is the fastest way to train your mind. You go in and in the first fifteen seconds, you think you are going to die. You regulate your breathing and settle in.
The adrenaline is flowing through your body but it is the good adrenaline. It is not the adrenaline that we create from stressful thoughts. It does all these other amazing things physiologically. Once you do that, you feel like you can conquer the world. There are all these amazing happy chemicals coursing through your body once you get out. I recommend that. I do little mini retreats at my home in the Berkshires. I live in Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. We have a wood-fired hot tub that we occasionally turn into an ice tub. We will do a Wim Hof-guided breathwork and take people in there sometimes if they are willing.
You don’t have to go extreme. Simple breathwork works. I’m also a HeartMath Certified NeuroChange Solutions Consultant. We weave in the HeartMath tools when I teach Dr. Joe Dispenza work. There is a simple breath called Heart Lock-In technique. You probably know of that. It is so simple. You can’t imagine that it would work. It is as simple as you start breathing deeply into your heart, in and out slowly and you connect with a regenerative feeling like gratitude or compassion as you are breathing in and breathing out.
You take that regenerative feeling. You radiate it out and back to yourself. It is the back to yourself part that when I teach that, people are like, “I felt I never take it back in.” That is the love yourself first part of my Love. Eat. Heal. We always forget ourselves. We always forget to bring that love, compassion and gratitude back into ourselves. Simple breath like that will regulate your heart rate variability, go into coherence and regulates your nervous system.
We always forget ourselves. We always forget to bring that love, compassion, and gratitude back into ourselves. Click To TweetAs you say that, it reminds me of the Tonglen practice of the Buddhist teachings where you visualize that you are pulling in the suffering from whatever. You are breathing out the loving energy but you can’t breathe it out unless you have it first. It is this give-and-take process that you are talking about. The HeartMath, as powerful as it is, couldn’t be a whole lot more simple.
If I visualize that when I’m breathing, I’m breathing in through my heart. When I’m visualizing that loving energy, I visualize that I’m breathing it out through my heart. It is a breath but if I’m visualizing the power of your thoughts to shift the energy, especially within your mind-body energy system, you have tapped into some wonderful stuff there.
We are living in incredible times. The world of allopathic medicine is a thing and God bless it. If you have an accident, the hospitals are there and there are beautiful skilled doctors out there who are passionate about what they are doing. We also have all of these other modalities. We don’t have to have or we could have and.
We have all of these kinks or glitches in the system where we got all these pollutants and all of this lack of nutrition in the food that most people ingest. This broader range of solutions is useful to address these things because allopathic medicine is phenomenal for the physical crisis. It is miserable for chronic illness. Most of the chronic illness that we experience and watch other people go through is not from a car accident.
It is from lifestyle, lifestyle changes, the use of the mind energy and breath and paying attention to what we take in and what we eat, whether it is what we are eating through our auditory channels, thought process or our digesting things physically like food and water. All of that stuff can be shifted a little here and there in ways that produce tremendous results because your mind, body and energy system want to thrive.
We are built to thrive but we haven’t been taught that. We haven’t been taught that this magnificent thing that we were born into has so much intelligence. The heartbeat, the digestion and the breath are automatic. We take that for granted. We are like, “Out there is much smarter.” No, in here is much smarter. That is what my journey has taught me and truly the answer lies within.
Love, Eat, Heal: We’re built to thrive, but we haven’t been taught that this machine that we were born into has so much intelligence. We take it for granted.
Another tool that I got certified in was teaching a certain style of Qigong called Dragon’s Way Qigong, which was designed by Grand Master Lu out in New York City. I found his work way before I got sick. I reflect on it because, at the time, the program was designed to help people with using these ten moves to help people lose weight. I wasn’t overweight. I wanted to lose a little. I was like, “I’m going to try this and it was fantastic.”
I read the book a few times. It had these beautiful, wise perspectives on the five-element consciousness framework. I wasn’t ready for the deeper lessons at that time. I circled back to it as part of my healing journey. I would never have gone to Manhattan to take any of his classes. Everybody was throwing their classes on Zoom.
All of a sudden, I got to take Grand Master Lu’s program. I was so intrigued by the meridians. It uses acupuncture. You go there as the patient and you have somebody stick needles in you to open up your energy paths. When you are in tune with your energy paths and you are learning where those energy paths are, they are invisible. There are no accents. When you have an acre pain, there is an energy block. We do some of the work.
In Western medicine, you look at the X-ray. It is better. I started doing the Qigong and my ankle hurt. I was like, “What the heck?” I asked the grand master, “What is going on?” He said, “That is because it healed at a superficial level.” What Qigong does is heals at a deep energetic level. There is this whole concept of the quantum field of energy and we are energy beings.
I love this time. Quantum physics and science are catching up to spirituality. Zen masters, Buddhists and Qigong Masters knew all of this 5,000 years ago. They understood it. In modern-day science, quantum physics is proving all of the works that these amazing masters knew for centuries. I found that to be a great marriage sometimes when I’m teaching Dr. Joe’s work because it is great to bring different perspectives. Not everybody hears everything the same way. I can bring in this energetic perspective that I learned through Qigong. That is the magic. What a lot of us are doing is we are not relying on one perspective to help our clients.
Years into doing therapy, people would ask me, “If the stuff you have learned is good, why do you keep taking other training?” It is what you said. Not everybody is going to hear or be drawn to one particular style of therapy, technique, breathwork or energy fieldwork. They are all talking about the same thing but they are using a different mindset, set of parameters, set of jargon and template for looking at it or conceptualizing it. One of those is going to resonate with the person on the left in the room and not with the person on the right and vice versa. If I present 5 or 6 options of different pathways to the same result, I increase the probability that whomever my audience is is going to be able to find one that they are comfortable with.
That is what I tell people. I was like, “Even when you’re choosing a therapist, you need two things at a bare minimum to have a therapy or a therapist that works, a therapist that knows what he or she is doing and someone with whom you are comfortable.” I can have the most powerful technique that I have ever discovered for doing therapy and if I present it to somebody who is not comfortable with it, it is not going to help them. They won’t even come to me long enough, engage the practice enough or be open while they are engaging it enough that it can benefit him.
The power of the mind is there to heal or keep me stuck. If I’m not aware of what that guy Finley would call the mechanical level of mind that keeps churning and it is churning when I’m asleep at night and when I wake up in the morning, I’m not even aware of it. If it is churning at negative thoughts, helplessness, hopelessness and victim mentality, I perpetuate that experience in my life. If I change it, I have new opportunities and possibilities.
It is such a great time to be alive because we have access to all of this. Look at your show. You are reaching people who know who is reading it. It is touching lives and sparking interest. There are all these great practitioners, scientists and thinkers that are looking to create a better world for ourselves, a better planet and a better life, living the best versions of ourselves.
The United States is the land of opportunity but we were founded by the Puritans. It is in the zeitgeist. That is unconscious. Those little thoughts might slip where it is like, “I can’t have too much because that would be greedy.” We live in an abundant universe. There is more than enough for everybody. If we could teach that, the whole planet would be dancing. What we need to do is, one by one or group by group, shift that consciousness slightly.
We live in an abundant universe. There's more than enough for everybody. Click To TweetI believe that is the goal and objective because you know those negative emotions carry a low vibration and we are all energy. We are 99.99% energy. If we could shift the lower vibration to a higher vibration and go from sad to happy, I don’t know what the factor is but there are some statistics that higher frequencies have a bigger impact on the world than the lower ones. That is why we still haven’t blown ourselves up.
The idea is that there is a power in our thoughts. If I’m not paying attention to the negative ones, take my fingernail and drag it over the back of my wrist here on my skin. If I have an itch, I can do that 10, 15 or 20 times a day, no problem. It is doing something. It is changing a sensation. Most of us who have worked with people have seen people who have obsessive-compulsive problem patterns. They do this relatively harmless thing thousands of times until there is a wound.
Think of the same harmless negative thought that I wake up with. I don’t do the journaling. I don’t say, “I don’t prefer that thought. I would prefer this one. Let me create this.” If I don’t do that, this is what you are tapping into. It is the consequences and the damage we do to ourselves when we blindly walk through life, perpetuating the negativity we have been conditioned into. Even if you don’t add the breathwork and the energy in the Qigong, even if you can identify the negative thought patterns and choose something more positive, you get a big benefit right there.
Doing it once is not going to solve it.
Scratching myself once isn’t going to cause a wound. Shifting over the positive thoughts once isn’t going to dismantle that pattern but it is possible to dismantle that pattern. It is possible to use that power of thought in a positive healing, growth and expansive direction. I need to choose to do that.
One of the reasons why meditation is great to help us do that is because we get into the operating system. If we get in there in the right way, it helps us produce the results potentially faster. That is the power of meditation. When you are under that stress, those negative hormones, thoughts and emotions, you are in high beta. You cannot have a successful meditation in high beta.
What I teach is simply what the brainwave states are and where you want to get. You have to get yourself. A lot of times, breath gets you there the fastest into an alpha brainwave state, which is a much more coherent brainwave state and where we are more suggestible. The easiest way to explain to somebody how they are in it often is back when infomercials first came on.
They were only on late at night because television puts people in a trance. Late at night is when you are starting to come out of beta moving towards sleep. They know you are in that successful zone between alpha and beta. That is when they are trying to sell you all that stuff. We all have been in that zone. We know how to get there. We get there consciously. We stare ourselves down. We quiet our brains and thoughts.
Learn to voluntarily bring about that shift. I looked at the clock and realized we were pushing a limit here. Let me ask you to take a breath, get centered and think about what is aspect of what you do or you find most helpful for yourself or others that I either haven’t asked you about yet or that you want to go back and highlight.
We covered the gamut but I like to remind myself every day to start with, “What is my intention for today?” I didn’t speak that. I talked around it. Every single day, I do not get up from my journal or meditation without writing down what my intention is. I even had my intention for our interview because I wanted to come here, be fluid with what I was speaking and enjoy myself. I’m hoping that is what is shown up. We don’t let our life happen. We show up with intention. For that intention, I always marry it to an elevated emotion. The elevated emotion I want to have is joy and happiness.
Love, Eat, Heal: We don’t let our life just happen. We show up with intention.
That is what sets the tone of every day. I didn’t touch upon that but I would highly recommend that if you do nothing, even if you know you are going into a meeting, your old self would be like, “That person is always a jerk.” Stop that and go, “I’m going into this meeting. It is going to have an amazing outcome.” Watch how your life changes because your energy will change when you go into that meeting. That person may show up as a different person because your energy is different.
Simply by choosing an intention and within yourself, pairing that with one of the more positive emotions. Let yourself breathe into it and feel it before you step into the day or the next activity. I thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story. If people want to find out more about the work you do, where can they reach you?
The best place is my website, which is www.LoveEatHeal.com. I also welcome you to email me directly, which is Carole@LoveEatHeal.com.
Thank you so much for joining us. It has been a pleasure. I look forward to following your work.
It was an honor to participate in your show. I’m grateful for what you are doing. Thank you.
You are welcome. Blessings.
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Carole Murko is a master of change. Her path from Wall Street Analyst to NPR and PBS Cooking host and now to a mindset expert and health and self-mastery coach is what drives her passion for helping others make changes in their lives and enable them to master their thoughts and become the best version of themselves. Carole’s hallmark program is Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Neuroscience-based change program titled Change Your Mind, Create New Results.
She teaches this from corporations to corporate leaders and their teams to entrepreneurs, individuals, one-on-one and retreat-style groups. In addition, she coaches women on healing journeys. The program is designed to create a fundamental understanding of how your brain and body work so you can begin to master your thoughts to create your future. In her humble opinion, Carole says, “It is mind-blowingly effective when participants practice the tools and experience the transformation that changes their lives, their organization or their health.” She is also a Dragon’s Way Qigong instructor and Certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach.
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About Carole Murko
Carole Murko is the master of change. Her path from Wall Street Analyst, to NPR and PBS Cooking host, and now to a mindset expert, and health and self-mastery coach is what drives her passion to help others make changes in their own lives and enable them to master their own thoughts and become the best version of themselves.
Carole’s hallmark program is Dr. Joe Dispenza’s neuroscience-based change program, CHANGE YOUR MIND…CREATE NEW RESULTS. She teaches this within corporations to corporate leaders and their teams, entrepreneurs, individuals (one-on-one), and retreat-style to groups.
In addition, she coaches women on healing journeys. The program is designed to create a fundamental understanding of how our brain and body work so you can begin to master your thoughts to create your future. To master yourself. In her humble opinion, Carole says, “It is mind-blowingly effective when participants practice the tools and experience the transformation that changes their lives, their organization, or their health.”
Carole is also a Dragon’s Way Qigong Instructor and Certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach.
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