Have you ever tried acupuncture for autoimmune? If not, you really should try it. Listen in as I interview Morgan Rockwell an acupuncturist about her journey with healing from MS and how acupuncture therapy has helped her and many others. Even if you already do acupuncture you will learn a lot from this episode. If you’ve never tried acupuncture therapy then this episode should make you want to try it.
Connect with Morgan on her website or socials below.
https://sacredsoulfertilitycom
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Morgan Acupuncture Transcript
?Hello, this is Anna Laura Brown, host of the Autoimmune Rehab Podcast, where we explore ideas, solutions, and helpful hints to help you in your autoimmune healing journey. We strive to transform your health and inspire hope in you so that we can help you with your emotional healing and self-care, and some of your physical healing, things like diets, that kind of thing, which you know, you would find on any kind of podcast on autoimmune wellness.
Find all the episodes with show notes@autoimmunerehab.com. And now without any further delay, let’s get started. This episode is sponsored by doTERRA essential Oils and Wellness products. Curious how essential oils can help you boost your immunity and help you sleep better and more. Go to annalaurabrown.com/essential oils.
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Hello ladies and welcome to today’s episode. Today we are talking with Morgan from Sacred Soul Fertility. So Morgan, why don’t you give us a start off by telling us a little bit about yourself. . Excellent. So, um, I’m currently living in Portugal, um, but I’m American, so everyone always is like, well, you speak English so well.
So , I like to, to say that I’m from the US, and I have a background in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture and, um, with a specialty in infertility. Cool. Awesome. So what, uh, brought you to Portugal? Um, gosh, it’s a long story. Um, I was actually looking to do acupuncture over here and I was told that I could get a work visa and really flash forward like six years later, I just sat in front of a very important president.
Role is the university who, who’s, might have a way that I could get my license here. So, um, that’s mostly why I’m doing fertility coaching online now. It’s a very bureaucratic process, but I have hope . Well that’s amazing. So I take it, so you used to practice acupuncture in the United States then when you lived in the US Yeah, I had a clinic there.
I was in, I was actually in Idaho. Uh, I’m from the Pacific Northwest, so. Okay, cool. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s quite the journey. That’s probably not something I would do, just move to a European country and just hope that I can get a high license or, or get a, either or whatever. Oh my gosh. It just unfolded so differently and ended up having two kids and they were born here and so the nationality difference is what kept me here.
Uh, they have dual nationality, but um, Yeah, so they’re, they’re half Portuguese, so I thought it would be best to raise them here in their culture. And so they’re at least really steeped in that before we go back home. If we do. Um, we have a great life here in Europe, so that’s awesome. Cool. Yeah. So Morgan, I know you had mentioned to me a little bit that you’ve been through quite a bit of your own health journey, so why don’t you share with us a little bit about where you came from as far as your own health, that kind.
Yeah, sure. Um, and really it, it’s very heavily tied into how I got into acupuncture. Um, I was quite young when I had my first back surgery when I was like 19, and it was just kind of a fluke thing. Not many 19 year olds have a herniated disc and have to have a pretty significant back surgery. And it was just kind of pinned off that I was an athlete.
Maybe I had an injury that went kind of unnoticed and unhealed. Um, but then in my very early twenties, 2220. I started to get like, um, a big mess of symptoms and I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and a pretty heavy case of it so far that they were considering me, um, disabled. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t gonna work anymore just because the symptoms hit so hard.
so fast. Um, and it was just kind of like a runaway train. Um, for anybody who has suffered or struggled with an MS or autoimmune disorders, they kind of know what that feels like having just these really strange things happening and not really know what’s going on. Um, That’s crazy because 23 is actually pretty young for really any autoimmune disorder diagnosis,
Well, it’s, and at the time I was told it’s pretty common in women, but I, the age category is actually a little bit older, so, um, yeah, it was, it was really young. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s amazing. So what did you do from there? Then you got this diagnosis and how did you end up, like did you go see an acupuncturist?
Did that all of a sudden occur to you that maybe I should try this? Or how did that go down? Yeah, and, and kind of a way in, maybe it’s cuz I was like so young to my teenage years of having this angst, but um, I really think. It’s that intuition. There was this voice inside of me. The whole time the doctor was telling me, I was kinda like, this is I, this is just not me.
Like he’s talking about another person. There was this little voice inside of me that just kind of. I was like, you know, I understand and hear what they’re saying and I understand it from a medical point of view, but there’s something about this that is not right. And so I kind of went with the Western treatment and I did the medicine, you know, did the, the drugs, I did all of the things the doctors wanted me to do, but there was just something inside of me that was like, you need to do something different.
And so I started doing a bunch of research and um, I came across traditional Chinese medicine, which is heavily acupuncture. Uh, a part of that, um, and also included is Chinese herbs. And I ended up finding one, um, which was this little Chinese guy. Very quintessential T c M practitioner, hardly spoke any English.
I was like weighing over my head when I went to the clinic, but even after my first treatment, I just began to notice all the differences. That’s awesome. That’s cool. So I take it you just kept going with that treatment and then what led you to say, oh, maybe I could do this on other people. . Right. Um, and it was interesting cuz when I first went there I really didn’t know what to tell the acupuncturist.
And I was still bouncing from seeing like this neurologist and doing this test and, and every time I would report to him, What I was doing in the Western world. He’s like, okay, that changes the treatment a little bit. And that really piqued my interest. I was like, well, , how are you using needles to kind of correspond with what these Western doctors are looking at?
You know, I was really fascinated by it and I had wanted to go into the medical field. I was taking pre-med classes. Um, so it just really, I started to see very clearly how that path could unfold in an educational purpose. Um, and because I got such great benefit from it, um, it just seemed like a natural fit because it is so heavily steeped in.
Western medicine, um, then you just kinda take this little left hand turn of using needles instead of antibiotics and drugs and things like that. Yeah, for sure. So then instead of, you were in pre-med, so then instead of actually going to regular med school, you decided to pursue the Eastern Medicine documentary.
Absolutely. And it was very much of an integrated school. Um, yeah, it was fantastic. That’s awesome. So what, how hard was that for you to do while you still had ms? Did you, had you gotten enough belief that you could do the studies or how did that Yeah, that was like way down the line. I took like a whole good year of doing just sort of the western, um, and then I really got heavily into acupuncture, I would say.
Um, I took a good pause probably three years or so before I really pushed hard into studies. and every year I feel like I peeled back more layers of feeling different and feeling better and having less symptoms and being able to manage them. Um, but it did take a long time. I don’t think I finished, I graduated acupuncture school when I was 31, so there was a bit of a time gap there.
I was gonna say, cuz I was gonna say , this is pretty, it’s pretty severe and can be, can be problematic. And it’s like all of a sudden I be like, oh yeah, I’ve been, oh no problem. Let me go acupuncture. I’m like, I’m sure it wasn’t that easy. No, no, it doesn’t read like a storybook in any fashion because it always felt like one step forward, two step back, right?
Even in trying to study, like having a hard time memorizing things or just the sheer energy to like want to go to class and go to school and be a part of these things and really having. What I was learning from the king of the holistic approach was honoring all those aspects of me, those feelings I was having, of being, you know, disappointed and frustrated, um, physically not feeling well, these types of things, you know.
So I spent that time more caring for myself, doing some dental yoga, doing acupuncture, walking when I could, resting when I needed to. Um, yeah, it was good. That’s awesome. And so I take it you’ve probably been able to get off the Western medicine drugs today and that kind of thing, and you’re pretty much in remission then, or, yeah, yeah.
Actually my neurologist here in Portugal, um, very reluctant to like to look at my case. And now finally over the last six years, she was willing to consider it a benign case because whereas they still have the lesions that show up in the mri, they’re less than the originals. And I’ve not had any new ones. Um, through all of these years.
So we have a deal. Um, she’s not gonna push the medication on me unless I have a problem. I called her. So it’s like I feel really good about that because for my case, I feel I can manage without the medicine and, and have a healthy lifestyle. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. So flash forward too. So you get your acupuncture license.
Did you start your own clinic right away and start working with patients? I did with ms. I did. What did you do? I actually had a ton of people with autoimmune. Um, some were MS and autoimmune just kind of cross over the way the body just kind of turns on itself. So, um, I would treat everything from, like, when I first opened, you take everybody, right?
So neck pain, back pain, but then you really start digging in and see how many people’s bodies really aren’t working to support themselves. And I did. I was treated like a lot of cases of ms. Um, and just a lot of neurological things that didn’t even have diagnosis I found to be really successful to help neurological situations.
That’s awesome. That’s cool. So if somebody’s listening to this and they have an autoimmune condition and they’re thinking, you know, maybe I should try acupuncture. What kinds of things should they be? Questions should they be asking? How should they go about finding an acupuncturist? Sure. Most states have lists of people.
You always want somebody who’s licensed, um, N C C A O M approved. Um, you want somebody who’s got that, um, certification. They always have a list of great practitioners and somebody who does traditional Chinese medicine. That means that they’ve gone to school for a very long time and know how to use acupuncture as a whole theory and a whole medicine.
For example, you can go to your chiropractor and get acupuncture, but that is just needles being put in somebody’s body. They take a class on a weekend and they learn how to release muscle pain. It’s not gonna be the same as somebody who’s gone to school for, um, you know, to get their master’s or their doctorate in acupuncture and can apply this whole theory because for autoimmune and ms, you really need somebody who’s trained in the theory and can apply the medicine to the whole body.
To get the most. Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s great too, that’s definitely a great point to hear. I, um, quite a few years ago, I actually used to go to an acupuncturist too. She had actually studied both chiropractic and acupuncture. She had both degrees, right? Knowledge of the weekend. She was a double Chinese medicine doctor and an AC and a chiropractor, and I unfortunately had to stop seeing her because she actually got a new job working at the va.
So she now only works with vets. So she doesn’t see people who aren’t vets anymore . But when she was at the regular clinic, she was amazing. This was even before my autoimmune diagnosis. And I remember she kept telling me, I think you’ve got autoimmune issues or whatever, you know, and I’d go to the regular doctor and ask for tests and they would run the tests and not run ’em right and laugh at me kind of, and.
It actually finally took me going to a natural path at doctors when MD, rather than an MD to actually get diagnosed. Sure. The regular MDs just kind of blew me off and at some point I was kind of a little bit hesitant to be like, well, my acupuncture says they probably have it, because I thought they would just laugh at me, which they probably would, but you know.
Yeah. And it’s, I know in the US they’re still working really in other countries. They’re really working hard to push forward, um, the legitimacy of the medicine because we are so heavily trained. And like your acupuncturist, I spent, you know, an hour a week with my patients. How many weeks in a row? Like you really get to know Yeah, exactly.
In case you’re treating. And so you can see things that a doctor in maybe their 15 minute scheduled time can’t see just because. Have much more time where we’re looking and we start to see patterns, right? Your dog, your acupuncture, started to notice patterns that you were suffering from, and pointed her into this direction.
Yeah, absolutely. And at one point I was actually even seeing her like two hours a week for a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And I had people, I would see ’em too in some of my neurological cases, like in a severe crisis would be like three times a week, two times a week, three times a week, and then kind of for maintenance more once a week.
Um, and that’s a good point because you have to go. They kind of treat the build off of each other. Right. So you kind of have to continue with this. Um, after your first treatment, you might notice some relief, but fast forward a few months of doing study treatment, you feel remarkably different, right?
Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, I still go once a month to a different acupuncture clinic and I was actually just there like. 30 minutes ago from when we’re recording this interview . And I noticed a big difference. Like I usually try to go like a day or two before I start my menstrual cycle. Yeah. And I know what’s a big difference with how my menstrual cycle is if I do the acupuncture or if I don’t like about, oh yeah.
Four months ago I got covid right before and I couldn’t go to acupuncture cuz I had Covid. . I notice a big difference when my men cramp. Now that said, I had that in Covid at the same time, so that was a whole nother thing in and of itself. But you know , that’s really hard. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you do, it really can help your body go through transitions of its own cycles much more smoothly.
And so if you think about like ms, those kinds of, um, Some of those neurological issues, some of those symptoms, maybe the nerves aren’t communicating very well, that acupuncture can really just sort of soothe that. Yeah, for sure. And I remember her telling me too, that in Eastern medicine, Chinese medicine, they view the menstrual cycle a lot differently than we do in Western medicine.
In Western medicine, we’re always like, get rid of this. This is painful and horrible, you know? Whereas in Eastern medicine, they celebrated. Yeah, it’s true. And there’s practitioners that only treat menstrual cycles. They believe it should just come and go. You shouldn’t have any issues. But I mean, it is something totally explained about and celebrated from a female’s young age to their whole life.
And there’s practitioners that only work with menstrual cycles. Um, I. That’s how important it’s, yeah. That’s amazing. So, flash forward a little bit, and now you’re in Portugal and you’re doing primarily online, like mm-hmm. fertility slash coaching. How did you get into that? So when I was still treating a lot of autoimmunity, I also, I mean for infertility is just such a huge, um, issue, right?
Like one in six couples. It’s just so many women and men are suffering from it and there’s just not a lot of support out there for alternative solutions. Um, in the US it’s very expensive to get IVF and many people jump this rope if I can’t get pregnant and. I need I V F and I just saw a huge gap there where, again, since acupuncture is so good, like you have it to help regulate your menstrual cycle, it can just really clean up, um, the hormonal systems and it’s really effective at supporting men.
Um, and so I, so close to Canada, they have one of the biggest fertility symposiums in the world, and so I started doing my continuing education there and it just was such a Spit. Um, it just seemed to apply the medicine very, very beautifully and I got a lot of great results and I, I stuck with it because there’s so many things outside of acupuncture that can be done to affect fertility.
Um, so it’s been kind of my lifeline to my medicine. my dream job. You know, it’s been hard not working in the country that I’m living in. Um, but now in the day and age of online, you can do it anywhere in the world. For sure. Absolutely. That’s great. So did you start doing the fertility stuff when you were here in the US and then you just continued that?
Yeah, and so I just kind of dropped the acupuncture part and picked up, it’s, um, kind of coaching, it’s under the guise of coaching. Um, and so I’ve done everything from written books to um, um, you know, holistic care for P C O S. to, um, really getting into understanding what’s underneath infertility. That’s cool.
So have you had people that you’ve worked with that thought they were gonna have to do I V F that were able to get pregnant without having to do it then? . Yeah, absolutely. And that’s like a huge answer to the prayer, right. You know? Yeah. It’s a big decision for couples to have to make either to come up with the money, are they gonna do this?
What if it fails? There’s just so many aspects around that. Many can be supported. Um, but if people are willing to slow down, it’s not. To do things naturally isn’t like that quick fix, right? So some people just wanna go get implanted and get pregnant and it checks all the lists of their dream baby showing up at this month and at this year.
Um, but to do things more naturally, sometimes we have to be a little more patient. For sure. Absolutely. I mean, it’s just, it’s just like everything. I mean, some, that’s why some people want a drug for, you know, LMS or any autoimmune. They think the drug is just gonna be a quick fix. But ultimately, at least my experience has been with autoimmune, that drugs are never the quick fix.
In fact, they’re not fixed at all actually. no. And then you get those I, I didn’t know about for you and for others, but for me, I felt like a lot of side effects and just feeling kind of sick from having to feel better, I had to feel worse in some, in different ways. It was like, It just seemed like an unfair sacrifice, um, where they were helping in some ways.
I just felt really nasty in other ways. Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s like I, my, I still take thyroid medication because my doctor’s like, oh, I still think you need it, and whatever. But like I discovered after a while of taking it that like, Didn’t, you know, didn’t really feel that much greater. And I actually feel better.
I have a specific supplement I take, it’s for the thyroid. And I tell ya, if I don’t have that, I really feel that . And yeah, that is one thing I take medication, I do have low thyroid and in the states you can get it with T3 or you can get supplements and they just don’t, I just don’t exist here. European and the supplements laws are very, very different.
Um, and that’s one thing I still do take is a thyroid medicine cuz I notice the difference. If I don’t supplement it, then I feel awful. . Yeah. . Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. So they probably have pretty strict regulations around wanting to, uh, practice like the herbal side of things with people there too. , they, they do.
Um, and I’m, I’m figuring out a way around it, um, because that’s a license that I’m getting in. Um, unfortunately, they. , every European country only has X amount of substances registered. And so for Chinese medicine, I think there’s 164 herbs registered here in Portugal, which is a fair amount to make formulas and do different things.
It’s not the, the, you know, 300 and some odd I had at my clinic on hand before. But hey, take what you got. But that’s one thing I’ve wanted to do is make my own, um, My own formulas per se. So if you say, if you could do that, you could probably sell ’em online even. And yeah. And that, that’s a, that’s a direction I wanted to add, you know, those little things you can mix and hot water, drink ’em like a tea.
Um, and those are great for fertility. Those are amazing for, um, autoimmune diseases and things like that. I used to, yeah, I’m taking some different ones from a couple different acupunctures sometimes. You know, some of ’em were more amazing than others. Let’s put it this way. Some of ’em, the taste was not quite so amazing.
Yeah. But there’s a way now that you can make ’em added to some flavors. So they’re like, my idea is to make it more like, um, something you can enjoy rather than something you have to get down. Cuz some of them are pretty nasty. Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, it’s like leaves and twigs, right? So it can’t taste that great.
for sure. Awesome. Okay, so tell us now a little bit more, if somebody’s listening to this and they wanna get in touch with you a little bit more, how would they do that? Yeah, so my site is Sacred Cell Fertility. Um, and you’re gonna see a lot of fertility stuff and you’re gonna see a lot about the, uh, Kasik records.
I’m also a practitioner of the Akashic records, um, which basically, um, is everything. Since the inception of your soul, every word deed thought is recorded there. Um, in the Bible it’s referred to as the Book of life, and so it’s just a way to get really great information about people. So, um, there’s a variety of things on that site that people can read about.
Cool. Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about that and how that, so like, I’m a, I’m not really familiar with that aspect of it, but to some degree with, you know, like say more of like a traditional energy reading mm-hmm. or energy healing type thing. How does, how does that differ or what does that do for people?
It’s just a different plane to get the information from. Um, I do do readings for people. Um, and so I found that to be really helpful. , anything that’s happening to our physical body. We have so many other aspects to us, and we’ve really, you know, going through all of my process, I was out, oh, you know, mind body’s soul, and I’m like, yeah, that’s great, but like, what does that actually mean?
Mm-hmm. . And so really having a way to have access to what somebody’s mental aspect is doing and their emotional aspect doing versus their physical and sometimes. Really weird patterns underlying that we just came in with this life into this lifetime with or that are from other generations and they manifest as these really awful diseases.
They manifest as infertility. Um, and getting to understand what those patterns are. Like if I could give somebody a reading and tell them, oh, this pattern is based on this and this, what happened here and there gives them an opportunity to shift and heal that, and then things really dramatically change in their physical state.
That’s cool. That’s awesome. Yeah, I think that’s definitely something that a lot of us just don’t understand, you know? And Western medicine definitely doesn’t get that. They’re like, what? Yeah, no, and just really, I feel like now more people are embracing their intuition and the spiritual aspect and kind of integrating it into other things.
Um, and that was just one thing I’ve always had a gift with. In treating people a lot with acupuncture. I just really have a very strong intuition about what was really going on as to the why. So like your acupuncture pointed out, she thought she had autoimmune. My gift would also be like, okay, well I’m kind of seeing that it’s.
Happening like this because, um, yeah. That’s awesome. That’s cool. Yeah, because like I’ve discovered more and more that in order to really truly heal from an autoimmune, you have to kind of, at least to some degree figure out, you know, why did you get it in the first place? Was it cuz you were super stressed?
You know, maybe it was a little bit genetic. Maybe you had a traumatic event in your life. Maybe, you know, a culmination of all the above. Gut. Yes, absolutely. Don’t you name it, you. . And so being able to have, like the reason I got certified in the Acacia records is because it’s just a really clean way to go about it.
I know a lot of people had some bad experiences with readings, or if they hear reading, they think of the old gypsy woman in a tent when the crystal ball or the psychic that tries to totally and it’s, yeah, absolutely. And so to really try and. To clean it up as much as I could. I got this like the only certification I could find from a fantastic teacher.
She’s amazing. Um, and so you can really help give that gift of clarity to people. Cuz we don’t always know what we can speculate, right? And so to have somebody else read it for us and say, Hey, I’m really seeing that it’s. because of this, this, and this, that it’s happening for you is really healing. It’s such a gift to be able to do that for people.
That’s awesome. Cool. So did you figure out on your own why you initially ended up with MS at 23 years old ? Yeah, and it was, I mean there’s still like layers and layers of it that come back, but it was just, for me, it was just really. It was about giving up my own power. I just grew up in a really, um, in a, in a house where I didn’t feel seen and heard and in a family, and that was not on them.
That was just kind of part of my dynamic. And a big lesson for this was for me to stand in my own power and to feel seen and to feel heard, to create this reality where I am seen and heard and seen and hearing myself. And so it really appealed back tons of layers of how I showed up in my own life. Um, and it was really interesting and it’s, it was, it’s, it’s really changed how my life has unfolded greatly.
I’m very, I’m actually very grateful for it. . That’s awesome. That’s cool. That’s amazing. A lot of times they say you can learn your own lessons from your own health challenges and then share them with other people and help them out, so that’s awesome. Absolutely. Even though I had a trip up the other week and um, I just ended up super, super anemic and I was like, gosh, I don’t know where that came from.
I’m doing everything diet wise. All of these things have been great and so just, I got into my records and, and found out that just the stress of all of these transit. Over the last year. , it actually tore apart my mental body. I found my mental aspect of myself was trying to think my way through life and it just wasn’t working and it resulted in this, right?
So you don’t always know. It doesn’t always equate. And so I was able to go back and do some different things and I mean, I’m feeling much better now, um, and doing supplementation and things, but to really, uh, give myself forgiveness for trying to just mentally bowl my way through all of these.
Transitions, you know, and allow them just to be and un unfold a little bit more. Um, and just kinda love that aspect of myself too. Cool. That’s awesome. So, anything else you wanna share with anybody that’s listening to this? I always just love to give the gift that there’s always hope and people can improve and, you know, it can feel like such, um, a sentence.
Sometimes having, um, an autoimmune disease, it can feel just really awful. And to know that there is. , there’s other options out there. There is hope, there’s people to be supportive. Um, that they’re not alone. People aren’t alone. That’s awesome. That’s great. Thanks for sharing. Okay. So if you wanna get in touch with her, we will have her links to her website and maybe some of her social, some of the other things in the description.
So you go down below, check those out, follow followers, subscribe, whatever else. You know , we’ve got down there. Check it out. Yeah, I got a few social handles. Awesome. Great. Thanks so much for sharing with us. You’re so welcome. Thanks so much for having me.
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