You’re Not Broken—You’re Stuck in a Loop: Limbic Retraining + Neuroplasticity for Chronic Illness

Welcome back to Beautifully Broken, where healing meets high performance. Today, I’m exploring a truth that’s changed everything for me and my clients: we are not broken machines; we are adaptive, conscious beings in dynamic systems of repair.

After years of sitting with people navigating complex chronic illness, I’ve realized that our biology is not just chemical, it’s also energetic and informational. Our nervous systems are constantly scanning for safety, and when symptoms arise, they often become the story our brains use to make sense of chaos: “It’s my mold,” “It’s my MTHFR gene,” “It’s my hormones.” These narratives can help us, but they can also trap us.

The healing work lies in the yes, and… validating the diagnosis, while remembering we have levers of influence: breath, movement, light, connection, thought, and time in nature. Pattern interrupts, tiny shifts in our inner dialogue and sensory experience, can retrain our physiology, lower inflammation, and awaken resilience. Healing, ultimately, is the art of creating new internal conditions where health can return naturally.

This episode is a reminder that you are not a malfunctioning machine, you are a masterpiece in process.

Episode Highlights

[00:00] – The nervous system as storyteller: how our brains create meaning from illness
[01:24] – “I am broken because…”: how health narratives form and when they hold us back
[02:47] – Why healing must include biology, energy, and information—not just chemistry
[04:15] – The power of breath, cold, heat, light, and thought to change physiology
[05:11] – Nature therapy: the most accessible medicine on Earth (and it’s free)
[06:40] – How fear-based stories become cages and the ego resists the real work
[07:32] – Limbic system retraining: the ROI of rewiring your stress response
[08:55] – The bridge of true healing: biology meets consciousness
[09:45] – Healing isn’t fixing; it’s changing the conditions for adaptation
[10:01] – A closing love letter to your body and its innate intelligence

Links & Resources

The Biological Blueprint Program: https://www.beautifullybroken.world/

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Silver Biotics: bit.ly/3JnxyDD

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 LightPathLED: https://lightpathled.pxf.io/c/3438432/2059835/25794

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 CatchBio: https://catchbio.com

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CONNECT WITH FREDDIE

Work with Me: https://www.beautifullybroken.world/biological-blueprint

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:01.708)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast, where healing meets high performance. From cancer recovery to wellness technology, we bring you real stories and real innovators to help you reclaim your biology and build your personal blueprint for health. Let's go.

Freddie Kimmel (00:24.591)
Hello, welcome to the show. Let's jump right on in. I've been thinking about my time working as a wellness concierge, and that is really sitting with people who are doing their best to make sense of what is happening to their bodies. And I'm bringing in my unique lens, and I'm really just listening. And almost always, when somebody's overwhelmed and...

symptoms are taking up a large part of the bandwidth of the day. And the nervous system is grabbing onto one primary storyline as the organizing principle. it could be, I am broken because of dot dot dot. It's my MTHFR methylation issue. It's my fatty liver. It's my mold. It's lime. It's hormones. It's insulin resistance.

its resistance to weight loss. Now, to be clear, all of those are valid. Many of them are measurable and some are absolutely part of the picture. But my job in that moment is not to rip away that narrative. It's to hold space for it, to validate where somebody is at, to honor the lived experience and respecting labs, respecting symptoms, the fear and the fatigue that are present.

in that moment and gently introduce this expanded model and this concept that it's very valid. The body is a biochemical body. There are chemical reactions. We're also an energetic body. The body is also informational and your system is constantly responding to what it perceives as safe or unsafe internally as well as externally. And

That's the big yes and I want to talk about today. One of the hardest parts, again, this is just my working theory in my opinion about the amount of information we have today is that it becomes very easy as a meaning making machine to believe that I am nothing more than this chemical cascade initiated by an outside threat. Now that could be a virus from a pandemic.

Freddie Kimmel (02:47.105)
It could be an environmental toxicant like mold. It could be an internal influence like Lyme or Lyme's co-infections. It could be cancer. multiple things can be true at the same time. We know this if we're listening or visualizing or understanding the human experience. A cytokine storm is real. A chemical cascade from histamine intolerance is very real.

And mass cell activation is very real. And we're a lot more than this. It's not just biology happening to us. We are biology in relationship with attention, perception, environment, nervous system state. Even mainstream physiology shows we have these levers, real levers that we can pull that will influence the autonomic nervous system. So that could be breath.

That could be cold and heat as both of these hormetic stressors that could be movement, sleep, that could be light, that could be connection. And most importantly, in my humble opinion, the power of thought when it becomes a practiced pattern. You know, there are plenty of examples in the literature showing that a pattern interrupt

can shift the body's response very quickly from its heart rate variability to inflammatory signaling to pain perception to threat response. Now, it's not a magic eraser and it's not denial of real conditions that are conditional. But as a reminder, that's where we're not powerless observers inside this malfunctioning machine. Because here's what I want everybody to hear in this episode.

The internal voice, it's always on. It is always listening. It is the subtle cues we give ourselves every single day. It's that internal voice that's narrating your experience. Your breath is also always available. And the level of influence that exists in nature is something I can choose to step into.

Freddie Kimmel (05:11.268)
moment by moment. Getting outside and letting the senses do what they were designed to do, I have news for everybody. It's free. There's no subscription service, there's no shipping charges, there's no mastermind that you need to buy into. You just get outside. And this is not a theory that I'm speaking about. I am speaking from lived experience and the science that is available to us today. And I just want to add this.

My time working as a concierge, so I'm not functioning as someone who is prescriptive or telling people what to do or take. I'm simply sitting back, I'm listening to a story and I'm bringing my lens. But I'm helping people assemble puzzle pieces and I'm watching and I'm listening and I often see the brain do what the brain does best. It creates a story about what it thinks is wrong.

Sometimes that's very helpful. And sometimes that is going to trap us. It becomes our own cage. And I have been the greatest victim of this, specifically with mold and chemical sensitivities. It's really easy to create a story that may be partially true. At the end of the day, does it serve me? How strong or resilient am I or how vulnerable am I?

The funny thing is, it's not about being right. It's about being able to say that yes, and there's more. Yes, and there's more. This is where this community model of healing really steps in. Because you have to be able to see it. That's where the healer really does matter in his role. And I don't mean a medical white coat. I mean whatever role they assume. Someone who can hold up a mirror.

and allow you to see your behavior. Somebody who can help us check the bias, check that ego because the ego is ever evasive and will do almost anything except for the honest work that is right there in front of us. This limbic system retraining that I say ad nauseum, if you're struggling with a chronic issue, it's so helpful and it's so boring at times and you got to keep doing it. But

Freddie Kimmel (07:32.904)
Wow, does the statistical data point to a really good ROI? It's not as sexy as a stem cell infusion, but it works. And why I get excited about it is because again, it's free, it's accessible, it's internal dialogue, and it proves this point. You are more powerful than you've been led to believe. And this is like this bridge that I'm working towards here as we close.

You can keep and should keep investigating root cause. We should know our genetic blueprint. We should understand our detox capacity and my pathways unique to me. I should understand my metabolism, what infections exist that are chronic in the body. I should know my inflammatory levels. And we can upgrade the field the body is operating in. And so

I mean the signal your nervous system is broadcasting internally and externally to others. Take responsibility for that. The meaning your brain is assigning to things. The sense of safety your system is or isn't experiencing. Because healing just isn't fixed in the broken part. Healing is often changing the conditions in which the body is trying to adapt. The body is so smart.

All it's trying to do is repair to mitigate the thing that doesn't feel good anymore. But I want to say that again, healing is often changing the conditions in which the body is trying to adapt. Your body is so smart. It's always trying to help you. And so do validate, right? Validate the labs, validate the symptoms you're experiencing, validate the story. And also remember, you are not just chemistry.

You are a conscious, conscious being in a conscious body. You are a dynamic system and these small, consistent pattern interrupts done consistently like the breath work, exposure to morning light, movement, time in nature and connection. They can change the entire trajectory over time. This is the Beautifully Broken Podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel. Big love.

Freddie Kimmel (10:01.863)
my goodness, thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show today, head over to Apple or Spotify, wherever you listen, and please leave us a five star review. And if you wanna continue working together and learning, you could join the Biological Blueprint. This is my custom program I created over the last 20 years of life experience and education to help you move from where you're stuck to where you wanna be. There are over 20 different medical professionals involved. Everything is a walk and learn.

We can go outside together to the gym. There's lectures, webinars, downloadable PDFs on everything we've ever talked about on the podcast. It is my opus. It is my love letter to the human body and the operating manual I wish I had had when I started to get sick. You can also extend our relationship and deepen the process by going to beautifullybroken.world and check out our store.

Listed there are the technologies, the supplements, the products that I love and I personally use and I've curated for you. Most of them have significant discounts by using the link or the discount code, beautifully broken. And they do support the podcast through affiliations. Now, if you want to check out our YouTube channel, we've had some changes. Unfortunately, the overseers at Google decided we talked too much about silver biotics and nano silver and all our content from the last 10 years was taken down.

but we have a new channel and that link is also in the show notes. Now, finally, a message from my vast team of internet lawyers. The information on this podcast is for education. By listening, you agree not to use this information found here as medical advice to treat, diagnose, or cure any medical condition in yourself or others. Always consult your guiding physician for actual medical issues that you may be having. And our closing, we are in a paradigm shift.

The world needs you at your very best. So take these conversations as a jumping off point for further exploration. Remember, while life can be painful, how we put the pieces back together is a beautiful process. I love you so much. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, signing off.