Episode 35 – Eddie Enever | Naturopath, Cancer Coach, Meditation Teacher

Edward Enever is a naturopath with a focus on supporting people physically, mentally and emotionally throughout their cancer journey.

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Transcript

Murray Guest  

I’m so looking forward to this conversation with an awesome man I’ve got to know the last couple of years. Eddie, how are you?

Eddie Enever  

Good. I’m good. Thank you very much for that lovely introduction.

Murray Guest  

Well, I speak from the heart, my friend, you know that you are an inspiring person, and just a wonderful, I would say, I’m not gonna call you a naturopath, or a cancer coach, or a meditation teacher, they’re all great things that you do, but just as a person, I love the way you show up and the way that you talk and what you bring in this world. So looking forward to connecting today how you been?

Eddie Enever  

I’ve been really good. I’ve been really good. Life’s good.

Murray Guest  

And when you say ‘life’s good’, what have you been up to lately?

Eddie Enever  

What I’ve been up to lately, so mindful to not make myself too busy. But I’m on a bit of a transformation at the moment, doing a 40 day transformation. And it involves seeing what the body can do in a 40 day period, but also want to prove to myself that I can commit to myself for 40 days, and also a little bit of interest to see what the body can actually do as well. But just to really transform mentally, emotionally and physically. You know, I feel really good. But you know, with my history with cancer, and all that sort of stuff, I’ve only really just felt like my my life really getting back on track, with my career, with finances, with just everything. And I realized when I looked down that my midsection had grown a tiny bit. The actual thing, and I put it on my Facebook post when I released that I was doing a 40 daychallenge and all started with belly button fluff. And I realized that I was accumulating more bellybutton fluff, believe it or not. And that was my moment to go, oh, I need to get active.

Murray Guest  

So hang on a minute, is bellybutton fluff, is that a problem?

Eddie Enever  

No, I think it’s not a problem whatsoever. But it was the the amount and the frequency that I had to look into my belly button to clean up what was there. It sounds ridiculous. But that was the eye opening moment that I had to go, Oh, I haven’t been doing as much exercise lately. And I’ve been quite busy with work and things like that. And I just wasn’t happy physically where it was. So I made the decision. I’m going to give myself 40 days to recreate myself. And so I designed a program basically a 40 day, 40 in 40 transformation, and I’m going for it.

Murray Guest  

Fantastic. So if I think about my body, and your body. So I get this. So if I think about my body, it’s all about moving what’s around the midriff up to the chest. So that, and I’m not saying just the fat, I’m saying I want to move that extension of the front of the body that the bit of the gut to the chest. Is that? Is that how we’re exploring your 40 day transformation? Or is there some other measures as well?

Eddie Enever  

Oh, I did, I did a lot of measures like to actually see where I was at, like when it came to like blood work and body fat composition and all this sort of stuff. And I just really want to see what I can do in 40 days, because I’m going to do it at the halfway mark at that 20 day mark. I’m on day 10 now, so do it in another 10 days I’ll do another full workup and see where I’m at, then at the very end, I’ll do it again. But really just trying to change body composition, but it’s not just physical. It’s also just mentally just with the stresses of everyday living and business and things like that. I just noticed that emotionally I was good. But I could do better, dedicating also the 40 days to go in within with mindfulness and meditation and a practice called Loving Kindness directed towards myself just to you know, take me up a couple of notches. Like I said, I feel really good, but I know that I can feel better. And I’m going to do that.

Murray Guest  

What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed in the first 10 days?

Eddie Enever  

First 10 days physically I feel really strong. Yeah, physically, I feel really strong. Mentally much calmer. So when it comes to sort of self regulation of emotion, I’ve noticed a bit of a difference there which is good, be able to keep yourself calm in different challenging situations, whether that’s work or whether that’s children, noticing that I’ve had some benefit there. But yeah, physically I feel really good at the moment.

Murray Guest  

Oh fantastic. And have you changed, can I just check in, have you changed your diet much as well as part of this program?

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, I have I have I’ve just sort of cleaned it up a bit. I’ve gotten a bit lighter with the diet. So with the caloric intake of lightened up and I’m doing a bit of an anabolic cleanse of I’m using a few things to help to to build lean muscle mass and drop body fat. So it’s a bit of a structured program that I have nutted out and sort of designed for myself, I’m a pretty big guy. I’m six foot seven. So you know I need a fair few calories just to maintain the frame, but I’ve sort of individualized that for myself just so I can, again, just drop that body fat percentage on the physical level.

Murray Guest  

My son has a friend. So son’s 17, and his friend is about six, four, maybe six, four and a half. So as you know, 16-17 year old is quite a tall, young man, but what I noticed with and because he plays basketball, and some of those taller boys, and notice there’s a tendency to sort of stoop a little bit, because they’re taller boys. Is that something that you’ve had to be mindful of as well with your height?

Eddie Enever  

If I do, it’s probably not a conscious thing. Doorways are always duck a little bit. That’s just the natural response, because I’ve come a cropper a couple of times. But no, I think I carry my frame relatively well. I’ve never been sort of one to like, sort of hunched down to get to other people’s levels. I don’t think. But it’s not something definitely not conscious, if I do it it’s not on a conscious level. It’s never really been a big thing for me. I don’t see how height has been, it’s just just my machine, isn’t it?

Murray Guest  

I think, I think the fact that you carry around a milk crate for other people to come up to your level for them, yeah. It’s a really great approach.

Eddie Enever  

Thanks. Murray, thanks.

Murray Guest  

No worries. Now, to change the topic up a little bit to how we got to this point, or where you are in your life right now. You have had a bit of a journey. And you touched on it just just a moment ago, mentioning your cancer journey and what that’s been like, I’d love for you to share the journey you’ve had and what you’ve got out of that.

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So it all started 10 days before Christmas in 2013 actually, had a diagnosis of testicular cancer. And at that point there, my then-wife, she was pregnant, and I had a two and a half year old. And life sort of come crashing down at that, you know, just wasn’t expected to get the big word, the big C word. And really not knowing what to what to make of it and so close to Christmas to with all the energy of Christmas. Four days later, I was in hospital as getting the righty chopped off. And then from there really went on a bit of a two year journey of battling for my life. At the beginning, it was all very low key. And it’s just like, you need just a tiny bit of chemo, like literally like one dose of chemo. That’ll sort it. For people that don’t know testicular cancer is the most treatable cancer that you can actually get sort of very high success rates with like first line treatment. So you should generally have the operation to get the testies removed, and then you have a little bit of chemotherapy. And then that’s it. Success rates right up in the 94-96% success rate. Yet, with me, I had a two year battle, I had three relapses in two years, got quite advanced spread, so it got metastatic into my body. And then I had at my worst, I had a nine centimeter by eight by three centimeter tumor in my abdomen that was pushing my bowel up against my abdominal wall. Two tumors in my chest, I had two in my collarbone, one on the neck and one in my lung, it was a lot of tumor burden, and it was getting quite aggressive. And because I’d had so much treatment, each unsuccessful treatment with chemotherapy, it gets more and more aggressive. So essentially, what happens is with cancer, you have weak cells, and you have strong cancer cells. And the weak die first and the strong take a little bit more. And so when you have unsuccessful treatment, what was left behind was the strong ones. And then it’s the strong ones that regrow and so you end up with a population of strong ones, if that makes sense. And so that happened three times. So I got to a point where the drugs weren’t working anymore. So I was quite chemo resistant. And it was very, very heavy treatment. So I really had to look into what was going on. Like it just didn’t make sense. The science shows that I should be getting the sort of first line, first line treatment, you know, I was doing the right thing dietary, I was supporting with the right supplementation without interfering with it yet it kept coming back up at three months, after six months and so on. So, you know, I really had to take a step back and look at like, what’s going on here? Why, why aren’t I getting well. And at that point, it became really quite obvious that it wasn’t what I was doing that was the problem. So it wasn’t the treatment. It was the way that I was doing it what was the problem. So at that time, I was in quite a stressed out world. I had a relatively large health center. We had 15 practitioners working with us. Everything from chiropractors to psychologists to massage therapists, you name it, we sort of had it, 15 of us. We had a cafe, a yoga hall and it was a big acre block or three quarters of an acre block that it was all on. So it was a lot of upkeep. And I was essentially pretty much a single operator. I didn’t know what I was doing when it came to business, I actually got gifted that business, I got given it for free. Which, you know, that doesn’t happen. You know, it’s it was a 10 year old business and literally gifted it by this beautiful lady who hold very dear to my heart. And I didn’t know anything, like nothing about business, but I knew how to work hard. So I worked hard, and I worked harder when it wasn’t working, I just kept working harder. And you know how it can be with business. Sometimes you can wear many hats, you know, scrubbing toilets, I was mowing lawns, I was marketing, you know, was micromanaging 15 people and then I was a naturopath, so I was consulting at the same time, and then doing the backend stuff, bookkeeping, all that type of things. I was incredibly stressed out, incredibly unfulfilled and really unhappy, to be honest. And it got to that third relapse where I had to go, wow. I’m trying to get well in an environment that’s not conducive to getting well. And it’s my life at the moment is what the problem is. So I had to make massive changes. And it took until the third relapse for me to really understand what the disease was calling from me. And so I had to really look at the business. And we ended up selling that business to one of the practitioners and it was great, it sold very, very quickly, which took that pressure off me massively to look at working smarter, not harder, and being able to delegate work, which I wasn’t very good at. And so I had to make massive changes in my life, had to find meaning and purpose within my diagnosis. And and when I did that, it unlocked the ability for me to get well. It played a really huge part. And it was a really powerful lesson for me in the role of stress and human health and also how powerful stress can be in blocking some of the best treatments in the world. Whether that’s medicine or naturopathic or anything. It’s so so powerful, and yet it gets no air play whatsoever. You know, we don’t talk about stress, you know, it’s that, it’s a thing out there, wherever there is you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t measure it’s not like a lump or a bump on your ratchet. You take notice, it sort of festers away in the background. And it just doesn’t get the Air Play that it deserves. And it was a really powerful lesson for me in that and I had to change to save my life. I also went overseas, went overseas for eight weeks, and I am at that point because the drugs weren’t working, I had to go above and beyond, I had to essentially create my own statistics. So I went overseas, and I did some very in depth hyperthermia works. I hate treatment, but you hate your body up to sensitize the cancer that’s in the system to a treatment to an oxidative tremor, like chemotherapy. And so I spent eight weeks in the Philippines deep in the heart, in the provinces of the Philippines at a hyperthermic clinic by this academic doctor. He looked over there because he’s married to a Filipino, just in the middle of work. And I was out there, six foot seven white guy deep in the provinces and the average height over there’s about four foot. So they thought of some sort of God in their massive Filipino smile, I was looking at you everywhere I’d go. It made me laugh and come to the shopping centers and all the the shelves are at Philippino heights I’d be walking through and as my nipple height. And so I could just see the whole shop and everyone’s like the whole shop would stop and look at me. It was quite interesting. So yeah, I spent eight weeks over there baking myself like a cooked chook. Essentially, I came back from my last little treatment. And that’s where I got well, I came back I made massive changes, got my stress levels right down, did the work overseas came back had my last 12 weeks of chemotherapy. And at that point, the cancer literally just melted away. It was like a hot knife. And oncologists just couldn’t believe what was happening because it wasn’t expected, I was pretty much going to be very hard to save my life at that point and just melted away. And that was it. That was the end of the cancer for me. But as anyone who’s been through cancer knows it’s not just a physical disease, mental health took a really big hit. Yeah, my marriage took a really big hit. And my wife actually left me in the middle of chemotherapy. The stress of the whole journey just got too much and we parted ways while I was undergoing treatment, which was really hard. And so I got through the physical disease, but honestly, it’s taken me about four years to get my life back on track when it comes to me who I am remembering who I am my place in the world what this world really worth means. Cancers got this amazing way of reprioritizing life and the rates of credit the grains of greener and what wasn’t used to be important isn’t so important anymore. And so try to integrate having that sort of new perspective on life or trying to integrate back into the modern world which doesn’t necessarily work like that you is a real challenge. And many, many cancer patients really, really struggle with integrating back in post cancer. So there’s a study done. And they looked at cancer patients who had successful treatment one year out, and 100% of cancer patients are depressed.

Murray Guest  

So I’ve just got us back up and running again, after a little bit of technical complications going on. But we’re good. I want to actually go right back to the start. Did you have any symptoms? Was there anything that you knew which led to you getting your diagnosis?

Eddie Enever  

There wasn’t a lot. At that stage, I wasn’t in my body, if that makes sense, I was up in my head, dealing with the stresses of everything. So I wasn’t overly bodily aware, I suppose. Towards the end, now we’re starting to get some sort of drawing pains in the pelvis sort of region, like the inguinal canal type bit, which started to worry me a little bit, some dull, aching sort of things that wouldn’t go away. And then on examination, I realized that you know, when the right teste was quite large, probably too large. And luckily, I have a one of my good friends is a doctor, GP. So I got to go straight to him. And then we got the the ultrasound straightaway, and then it just rolled from there. So in the lead up, not a lot.

Murray Guest  

So, Ed, yeah, let’s just have a bit of a exploration about how cancer patients are treated, or I guess, the support that’s available to them. Because what I I’m aware of is the great work you do you do now. And I’m making a big assumption. So please help me out that the work that you do just wasn’t available to you when you’re going through your own cancer story.

Eddie Enever  

Yeah. You know, with cancer, because obviously, when you’ve got cancer you go to typically a GP first and then you end up in front of an oncologist. At some point. The issue is around cancer, anyone who’s been through cancer will attest to this, that cancer is so much more than just a physical disease, you have mental, you have emotional components, even spiritual components, if you’re that way inclined. And when you go to the oncologists, they are very good at looking at the physical aspect of the disease. And for me, and what I’ve learned from my patients, I’ve treated hundreds and hundreds of cancer patients is that the tumor or the tumors, the symptom of the disease, not necessarily the disease, they are inaccurate, they’re absolutely a problem, but they’re not the problem. And when you go to the oncologist, all the attentions going to go on to the lump or the bump, not necessarily on to why the lump or the bump’s there. So medicine is very good at treating the what of the disease and not so good at treating the why of the disease. And so absolutely, for myself, you know, there was no one there, there was no conversations ever, around why this happens. It’s all damage control, which is understandable, because it’s usually quite an urgent thing. Early intervention is very, very important for the best outcomes. But if you’re looking for emotional support, or anything like that, you won’t find that within medicine, you may be lucky enough with a compassionate oncologist to get a referral out to a cancer counselor. So the Cancer Council, they actually do have psychologists and counselors associated with them that you can talk to and they’re very, very skilled at dealing with what comes up for cancer patients. But yeah, I suppose for your question, you know, that there is support, there’s a lot of support with Cancer Council and some of their little offshoots. But it’s not really made overly made overly aware of them sometimes. And you know, because you’re in damage control. So it’s all about getting, getting get your train with getting your cannulas bunk and get on your chemo, or radiation or whatever it’s going to happen for you. So it’s quite a hectic time. I call it the oncology train, it just takes off and it drags you behind. And it’s quite quite disappearing, because you just have to rock up and you just take the beating because these treatments are really, really harsh. It takes a lot of resolve and resilience for people to get through this stuff and to deal with the side effects. They are very harsh drugs and some of these triggers that radiation takes its toll as well. So yeah, honestly, a lot of people when you’re in that first stage are in that shock shock stage, and it can be you know, you’re just been doing what you’re told.

Murray Guest  

And you also talked about your trip to the Philippines and how that was, obviously breakthrough in helping you get that difference in your treatment. What was that actually like going through that where you’re going through that, that treatment and as you said, heating up your body. Yeah.

Eddie Enever  

So it was eight weeks, it was a long time to be away from family and children. But it was what needed to happen. I knew why I was going over there. In the back of my mind, I had this sort of hope that I’d go over there or do this hyperthermia treatment, cancer would disappear. I’ve come back, and I think it’d be fantastic. That wasn’t the case, went over there. And I went through eight weeks of pretty grueling hyperthermia. And to put it in perspective, there was a systemic hyperthermia that I do. So I’d go into a hyperthermia machine. And essentially what they do that heats your body up, so your head would be poking out, but your body was in this machine, and it would heat the body up and you’ve measured your oral temperature and your take your temperature up to around about 40 degrees Celsius, which if you’ve ever experienced a 40 degree fever, that’s a steaming fever, that is really, really challenging. And I would hold that for about 45 minutes to an hour. Wasn’t fun, but I’d do that three times a week. And then the rest of it would be localized hyperthermia, which was easy, it was just heating one area of the body up where the tumor was, or tumors were. And so it was quite challenging with that. But at the end of the treatment, my cancer hadn’t gone, in fact that it had grown, in fact that it tripled in size, I was really unwell. By the time I got back, I was in a lot of pain, because the large tumor in my abdomen, which was in between my aorta, and vena cava, which is quite a dangerous sort of place for it are two major vessels in your body. And the big sheet tumor, they called it, and I had to act pretty quickly. And so that’s when we got into chemotherapy. But then that’s when everything started to melt away. So I’d gone over hoping that the hyperthermia would have cured it. But it didn’t. But it was a very crucial part in allowing the treatment to follow, which was chemotherapy when I got back to work to full extent. And that’s when I had the total resolution. So it was hard going over there and being away for eight weeks. But in that it was also amazing, because I got a lot of time to go within. And really look at why this has happened to me, which was really important.

Murray Guest  

And I can imagine, as you said that eight weeks was was difficult being away from the family, but it’s something you had to do. And I can’t imagine like you’re saying what it’s like to heat your body up to 40 degrees and hold it for 45 minutes. And it’s interesting, I know one of the things you’re doing in your 40 day challenge is the complete opposite of that right now. 

Eddie Enever  

I am, not for 40 minutes. 

Murray Guest  

So the ice baths, which are obviously and a very much a different approach. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But what’s been your biggest lesson, do you think through this cancer journey?

Eddie Enever  

There’s two big lessons. The first one was what I mentioned earlier, which is around stress. So it was a major schooling in the role of stress and human health, and how important it is and how detrimental and how powerful it is, and how we have to take it so very, very seriously. And that was the first one. The second one was one about balance, and how important balances in life. And how important it is for me to maintain my balance. So whether that be the balanced diet, or the balanced financial state or the work life balance. It was a very, very important lesson to show me how to work smarter, not harder. Rather than just slug it out. And really actively work on maintaining balance in life. That was the two big letters around stress and around balance.

Murray Guest  

And now you are a cancer coach. And when you work with people, are you working with them at different stages throughout their treatment and their diagnosis? How do you actually work with them?

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, so it depends. Everyone comes in at different stages. Typically, they come in late in the piece because so many we have so much faith in medicine for good reason. But with oncology, the success rates aren’t overly good. And so typically, by the time someone comes to me, they’ve gone through the chemotherapy, or the radiation hasn’t worked or it’s come back they’ve had relapses and the searching for options. I would love to personally see them at the beginning of the treatment so I can complement their traditional quality care because we can get better results by working alongside the oncologist and their treatments. But the reality is I don’t typically because we do hold our doctors in very high regard, and we put our faith in them. And so sometimes that doesn’t happen. I do sometimes get people at the beginning, but more than likely the through the pace, something they’re looking for other other options. And so I take them on a bit of a journey into what it means for themselves. But we also know there’s dietary measures that we do very specific interventions. Specific supplementation that helps chemotherapy work better. There’s emotional support, so I’m there to support them through that. So they can hop on the phone and talk to me whenever they need to, I’m a very big proponent of meditation and mindfulness practices. It played a huge role in my life, my stress levels and during that period. So I teach that a meditation teacher, so I teach all my clients very in depth skills when it comes to the internal arts of meditation and mindfulness, to help them to regulate that stress through their journey, just to give them the best chance at their treatments working, and your body just doesn’t get well when you’re in stress when your vital body. Well, it’s not, it’s not a program for healing, it’s a program for survival. So it’s teaching people how to how to get their body out of that fight or flight survival mode into a mode that’s conducive to getting well. And sometimes that’s the most important thing, you know, because you’re blocking treatments like myself, and my story, my stress was blocking my treatments. And it took me three times, because I’m a bit of a dummy sometimes to actually really learn that. But it was a powerful lesson in that.

Murray Guest  

I can hear that. And I guess what I’m also thinking about, so if someone is listening to our conversation, and they’re thinking about their own stress, and whether they are or are not experiencing what you have, but just we all experience stress in some way. What what’s your, your recommended tips around dealing with stress?

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, so you know, sometimes we can change our stresses, you know, sometimes we take on too much stuff, and we create our own stress. So the key with stress is, if there’s stress there that can actually be mitigated or delegated to some somewhere else, you know, to actually get rid of the stress. But you know, the reality in life is that we have stressors that we can’t change, you know, we can’t change that we feel unfulfilled in our career or issues in our marriage, or our financial state, these can’t be changed easily. So sometimes it’s about changing our relationship to the stress. So the way that we perceive our stress, and this is where the internal work comes in. And this is why the internal arts like meditation are quite powerful, because it starts to change your perspectives on life and your relationships to your life. So you can still have that stressful life, yet, the stress doesn’t have to actually impact your health physically, mentally, emotionally, by changing that relationship to it. And you know, meditation isn’t hard, there’s many forms to there could be in the form of breath work. So deep breathing, and just deep diaphragmatic breathing is a simple meditation that’s incredibly powerful, and really, really good for you to get breathing properly, deep into your lungs into your belly. Or it could be a formal meditation practice. Or it could be you know, one of your hobbies, it could be something like, you know, painting, you know, if you’re into oil paintings, you know, that’s a meditative process, potentially, there’s lots of ways to get into that zone, that relaxed state. Meditation is particularly powerful, because it’s the act of form of sitting down with the intent to get into that state. And that states called the relaxation response where you feel like calm that’s an actual physiological response, and you can learn how to actually produce in your body. And, you know, it’s repeatable so you can learn those skills and you can apply it to your daily life and then you can start to see the changes happen.

Murray Guest  

Visualization is part of that process and and meditating around what are you visualizing? Are you visualizing things going wrong? Are you visualizing your future and moving forward? And, and, and, and how powerful that is, and, and how that connects back to that grounding, as well? 

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, absolutely. You know, these contemplative traditions, which are the internal arts of meditation, you can use imagery, you can use journaling, you can pose questions to yourself and sit on that wait for the wisdom to come through and then you can jot that down in journals and explore it on paper, you know, just a really healthy thing to do to get the stresses inside your head out of your body. So many of us have these stresses and they stay inside of our body. And it’s like repressive coping or internalized stress. And that’s the stuff that makes you really really unwell is when you don’t express your emotions, your stress in a healthy fashion. And many people aren’t comfortable, or have the skill set to really, you know, express their stresses in conducive ways that are healthy ways and when you don’t, you just bottle it up and it festers. And the chemistry of that stress, all the detrimental chemistry that stress produces, and these are inflammatory chemicals like cytokines and interleukins, which flare the body up. Now there’s studies that show increases cancer growth, now you’ve got a whole different sort of hormone hormones that get released into the body, and they make you feel horrible. And if you’ve got that chemistry floating through your veins day in day out, because of your perceptions, you can, you can do a lot of damage, you know, physically, but also mentally and emotionally. And it can take you into that negative mindset, where you’re only seeing the negative stuff in the world around you, as opposed to the beautiful positive stuff that’s there. But you’re looking at it through different lenses, aren’t you?

Murray Guest  

I think you raise a really good point. And I definitely don’t know anywhere near as much about this as you do. But I have heard about it around when we do have those hormones and chemicals being released under stress that they to put it in a real simple terms help create an environment for the cancer to survive.

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, well, you know, an inflammatory state. So most of these contribute, if you look at what stress is, it’s that survival response, a target jumps out got two options, you fight or flight. And so your body is up to do that. And so it prepares for injury, because you know, when you battle against a tiger, pretty likely, you’re gonna get a scratch on it. And and so you get these inflammatory chemicals pumped into the body to get you ready for that. Now the problem is back in the day, we would have got gouged by the the tiger or whatever it might have been. But these days, the tigers look a little bit different, they look like the bank balance. Or they look like the bank manager or they look like the wife or they look like the business or whatever it might be. And the injuries never come. And so that chemistry doesn’t have an opportunity to be used up and metabolize out the body. And so it persists in the body, and we start to build on that day in day out. Because we don’t have the stressors of old were acute stressors that come into your life, you’d have that stress, and then you’d come back down to a healthy baseline. Whereas these days, we don’t have that sort of stress, we have more chronic persistent stress, which is day in day out daily grind, one stress after another stress, we have multiple stresses on us all at once. And so that chemistry is just find it throws all the time, and there’s never that release, never that coming back to baseline. That’s how stress makes you really unwell. And when you understand it on that deeper level, you realize that it’s such a major thing for human health that you got to take it really seriously. But like I said at the beginning, it’s not taken overly seriously because we can’t see it, we can’t measure it. You know, I think humans we tend to act when we feel pain or something grows, but when we can’t see it, it’s sort of like, Yeah, somewhere, but it’s out of sight, out of mind type of thing.

Murray Guest  

I can imagine to the importance of the people around someone and how they are supporting the reduction of the stress in life, but also in, you know, when you’ve had a cancer diagnosis and, and how they are helping reduce the stress around that. And as hard as that might be, but the the language they’re using, the way they’re showing up the way they’re supporting. So that again, they’re helping reduce that stress to help you be in the best place possible for your own treatment and recovery.

Eddie Enever  

Yeah but it’s hard, you know, they are having their own experience of their loved one, their beloved, being unwell and fighting for their life. You know, cancer is a dance with death, you know, potentially for some people, their first experience of their mortality. And so it’s quite confronting, and the whole family has cancer. And this is what I when I counsel these people, when they come in, I love it when the whole family comes because they all have cancer, just not most of the family doesn’t have the physical burden, but they’re carrying the mental, the emotional and the spiritual burden of having cancer. And so they all deal with it in different ways in some deal better than deal better than others do. And some of them have to withdraw, some breakdown. And some people are the rocks of the family. And it’s really important for these groups, these families to travel the path together, so I really encourage that families travel with this as a unified front. And it’s sad because some people don’t have that. But it’s really important.

Murray Guest  

So you’ve mentioned a little bit about how you work with people in the work that you do. What does that look like?

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, so I typically there’s lots of ways that I work but the best way that I work is I have a four month cancer support program. It’s called your hero’s journey. And it’s about taking people you know, from when they walk into the office through to a successful outcome. And it’s teaching them the skills of mindfulness meditation, it’s getting them on the right dietary intervention and the right supplementation to complement their oncology care, you know, supporting them emotionally through that, and also helping them to find the meaning and purpose of their diagnosis. So why are they unwell and really encouraging and supportive and coaching them through and how to make the changes in their life that the disease is calling for. And so that’s a bit of a journey that I take people on, in four months, it’s a start, it’s, you know, it’s unrealistic to say, four months is, you know, you get all that done in four months, but four months is the starting. And it gets people on a new path to life and start living life again, not just existing through it. And I derive a huge amount of meaning and purpose from it. Now, these people, when they sit in front of me, you know, I feel that I know what they’re going through, because I’ve been there. And so I can connect to them on a much deeper level, I feel because it’s coming from a place of Yeah, I get it, I know. And then the message comes through a much stronger for them. And if I can be vulnerable with them, it allows them to be vulnerable. And then that’s when you can really shift people is when their vulnerability comes forward.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, I know how much you believe as I do the power of that vulnerability, and I’ve loved your vulnerability and sharing in this conversation. And I’ve what I’ve experienced is when people do open up and have that vulnerability, some of that stress comes away with it as well, doesn’t it?

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, yeah. A lot of people put up the facades and you know, when tough things happen, what are we trained to do in Australia, toughen up Princess, cup of concrete, get on with it. And all that is is essentially code word for all right, repress that emotion. And that doesn’t, that doesn’t help anybody. And so if you can mirror to them that it’s okay to not be okay. And, and help to draw that out of them. And then it just, you know what it’s like to have a big cry, feels fantastic. To have an outburst. It helps you to feel better. And so realize that that don’t have to hold face and be that strong pillar, it’s alright to have days that are really average. It’s just wallow in those days. So yeah, it’s just about helping people to purge that stuff out to allow them to move forward those next steps.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, well and powerful. So I just to check in. You are based in Perth, do you work with people outside of Perth as well?

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, I work with people all over Australia and New Zealand. And so you know, distance isn’t an issue because obviously with Zoom and Skype these days, it’s very easy. And we just express post, you know, supplies and things like that out. A lot of my program is video based, a lot of online content that they can watch of me, talking to them about the different topics and training them in meditation and breath work and things like that. So distance isn’t an issue.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, great. I mean, Perth is a very long way away. Let’s be honest.

Eddie Enever  

It is, it is. You don’t realize until you have to pay to go over East.

Murray Guest  

It’s the same country I believe?

Eddie Enever  

Apparently.

Murray Guest  

Did you grow up in Perth?

Eddie Enever  

No, I was born in New Zealand actually. Been here since I was nine. So I was born in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. Kiwi fruit country.

Murray Guest  

So Kiwi to an Aussie. So you’re a bit like Russell Crowe like, you know, have done that transition, I suppose.

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Murray Guest  

And I assume though Perth feels like home.

Eddie Enever  

It does. It does. I don’t I haven’t really lived anywhere else in Australia. And I really enjoy Perth. It’s got a very laid back sort of feel, which suits me.

Murray Guest  

It is a it is a beautiful, but I mean, I joke.

Eddie Enever  

Love traveling a lot more.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, I joke, but it is a beautiful part of the world. It is. Yeah. And we did touch on something briefly. I want to go back to it. So as part of your 40 day challenge. And are you also doing some hypothermic work if that’s the correct term, some ice baths.

Eddie Enever  

Hypo, hypothermic.

Murray Guest  

Yes. How’s that going?

Eddie Enever  

Cold. Very cold.

Murray Guest  

Well, it’s working. It’s working then.

Eddie Enever  

So no, my aim was to do 40 ice baths in 40 days, I’m on day 10 now. It’s pretty cold. So cold showers are one thing. Ice bath is a whole nother level of chilly. Typically around about 1.82 degrees is what I’m jumping into. But I’m only in there for four minutes. Believe it or not, you feel fantastic. It’s very, very healthy. Much like the heat treatment that I did. It stimulates the exact same thing in the body. It’s called hormesis, which is a full body response that hardens the body up and there’s a huge amount of health benefits from this hormesis this if you do it through heat or cold, I’m doing cold for ice immersion. So yeah it’s challenging, but you know, it’s very much a mind game. Know that the cold is just cold. And it’s very, very cold but it’s still just cold. The biggest thing is the psychological barriers of jumping in when you can see the ice bath full of massive chunks of ice. And once you’re in there, everything in you wanting to get out, you don’t let yourself, you know it’s a little bit of a metaphor for life. Sometimes, you know, how you conduct yourself in the ice bath is very similar to in life, you know, do you give up and jump out? Or do you do whatever it takes, you know, and you stick to your goals. And so, yeah, I’m learning that it’s much, much more about the mind than the physical, these ice ice immersions, there’s huge physical benefits, but there’s massive mental and emotional benefits too.

Murray Guest  

Well, we are catching up soon. And and you have said we’re gonna have a bath together. So I’m looking forward to that. Yeah. So just I’m already putting it out there. And maybe this is my mindset that you’ve been building up to this point. So, you know, maybe not jumping for the four minutes to start with. I’m just just checking in on that. That’s all.

Eddie Enever  

Yeah, start with cold showers. Start with you know, at the end of your nice warm shower, do 30 seconds of cold and then start to build to a minute cold and a minute and a half and then less hot, more cold, that sort of thing. And then that’s a good transition point into jumping into something a bit cooler than that.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, fantastic. And of course, Wim Hof has done a lot in this space, and he’s done some amazing things.

Eddie Enever  

Absolutely. It’s all about the breath. You know, I do Wim Hof breathing technique, I actually teach my cancer patients the Wim Hof breath technique. You know, the breath is your anchor points, especially for cold work it even for stress and anxiety is all about the breath, you know that breath has an amazing ability to calm the nervous system down. And so essentially, that’s what’s happening, you’re going into the ice, and your body wants to go into shock, everything about it wants to go into shock, into shallow breathe and to shiver. And yet with the breath, you control your nervous system and you calm it down and you stop all that happening. And you keep yourself in a really calm state within these extreme conditions. And the benefits then start to shine into outside life. Because when the stress has come in, it’s not ice this time, but it’s the financial issue or the relationship issue, whatever it is, you can maintain that calmer disposition within that stressful moment. So there’s lots of benefits. It’s good fun.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, well, I’ve done a little bit in the past. But certainly I’m looking forward to doing this with you. And as you said, how we approach the ice bath is a great indication of how we approach other parts of our life. So I’m loving the thought already of how I’m going to get insight into my own way of being in mindsets from doing this with you. So yeah, looking forward to it.

Eddie Enever  

I really think we should do it live on Facebook though. 

Murray Guest  

Oh, of course, of course. I’m just going out today to buy a wetsuit that’s all so. So if anyone wants to connect with you wants to find out more about the programs and his amazing work you do. Where’s the best place to reach out online?

Eddie Enever  

So yeah, so online, I have my website, which is just www.edwardenever.com. I’ve got Facebook presence, LinkedIn presence, Instagram, as well. So any of the mediums you can come through the website obviously gives you a bit of details on what I do. I offer a free 30 minute exploratory call with me if you do want to just have a chat and just tell me where you’re at and how I can potentially help you and give you some nuggets of gold to help. Please feel free just to book that in, you just got to go to my website and click the button. And that will take you through to a booking system. So that’s probably the best way to get in touch with me.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, fantastic. And I love your story on your website that we’ve explored today tapped into and if anyone wants to read that, again, it’s on your website. But also, I’ll make sure that links to all of those areas to connect with you are in the show notes as well. I’ve absolutely love chatting with you, I love your openness and your vulnerability. And you are what I would say is a real man, you are a real man. And thank you. And I mean that about that that comment you made earlier about this perception about not having emotions and and mean that from the depths of my heart that I love the way that you are sharing the message about actually to be a man we tap into those emotions and we share those and we display those because this idea of hiding those doesn’t help anyone. So thank you.

Eddie Enever  

Thank you, thanks for having me on.

Murray Guest  

That’s right, my my friend and also just to ask you the last question I ask in every podcast and that is what is your definition of inspired energy?

Eddie Enever  

So my definition which is following your bliss, which isn’t my words. That’s the words of Joseph Campbell. If you’re not familiar with Joseph Campbell, he’s an amazing, amazing man who came up with the hero’s journey. And his thing was, when you follow your bliss doors will open where there were no doors. And I think, you know, when we really tap into what floats our boat, what really makes the heart sing and following our bliss, then those doors open. And that’s when we have that, you know, inspired energy that we can really bring to the world.

Murray Guest  

I love it. And I love Joseph’s work as well. So I love that link, and following your bliss is a great definition. Thank you so much Ed. Again, I really enjoyed our conversation, connecting with you sharing what you do, I’ll make sure there’s links to everything in the show notes. Anyone that’s listening, please share online on social media, tagging Ed and myself and hashtag inspired energy. If you got something out of this conversation, and it inspired you please share that. Because when you do that, it gets out to other people as well. So thank you. Have a great week. See you soon for an ice bath, my friend.

Eddie Enever  

Not a problem. Thank you, Murray.