On The Healing Path with Natalie Cutsforth

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:00:00

trigger warning, the Resilience Project provides an open space for people to share their personal experiences. Some content in this podcast may include topics that you may find difficult, the listeners discretion is advised.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:00:19

Hello friends, welcome to radical resilience, a weekly show where I Blair Kaplan Venables have inspirational conversations with people who have survived life's most challenging times. We all have the ability to be resilient and bounce forward from a difficult experience. And these conversations prove just that, get ready to dive into these life changing moments while strengthening your resilience muscle and getting raw and real.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:00:49

Welcome back to another episode of radical resilience. I'm here with my friend Natalie Cutsforth. She's an intuitive healer, teacher, mentor and the author of change your energy sensitivity. She helps empaths to reduce the stress of feeling so much. She's a certified clairvoyant and has facilitated life changing transformations in over 3000 private sessions with clients all over the world. I am so honored that she's here today to share her story with us. Natalie was diagnosed with a disease that leads that led to a disability which as an intuitive healer and small scale farmer changed basically her life overnight. Natalie Hello.

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:01:33

Hello, Blair. Thank you for having me here.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:01:37

I'm honored. Why don't you tell us your story? I want to unpack a few things here. Like you are a

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:01:45

psychic. Yeah, I'm an I am I am a psychic. I like the word psychic. But a lot of people misinterpret it. So I like to say intuitive healer because my I'm using my psychic gift to see where people have blocks that keep them from having what they want in life. And I go in there and you know,

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:02:07

I love it and intuitive healer and a farmer. Yeah, so

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:02:13

I grew up on a ranch as in Oregon, and then went up to Colorado for college and was really active out there lived the Colorado lifestyle hiking, mountain biking, camping, snowboarding, I was on our ultimate Frisbee team in college. And so I've always loved to be moving my body moving my body really makes me feel at peace helps me move energy. And and so I was when I was in Colorado, also that I sort of became aware of my gift as an intuitive or psychic. And sort of that is where my my journey started.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:02:51

Wow. And you know, I'd love for you to share your story. Like let's talk about your life before your diagnosis, your diagnosis, and kind of where we are at today.

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:03:03

Thank you. You know, my life before my diagnosis is that I never even really thought about whether my body would do what I wanted it to do. It always just did. Um, it's not like I was like that Superwoman or anything. But I could do it. Like I could make it. You know, if I wanted to do something, I could train for it and do it and I can trust my body. And it did what I wanted it to do. So that was like really sort of the baseline for my life. When I left Colorado about 2016. To move back to be closer to my family in Oregon. I bought a 20 acre farm and I started being a lot more physically active farming, planting lavender gardening. We have chickens, there's lots of stuff to do always when you have land. And and I was still riding my bike and hiking and stuff. And then things got a little funny in 2020. So at the end of 2020, I guess I want to back up a tiny bit and say that mid 2020 I started experiencing a lot of clients coming to me right as the pandemic started that were really highly traumatized. There was tons of people that had never really looked at stuff inside themselves that were like hope the world's falling apart and as an intuitive healer. So I went from like I usually do like 400 readings in a year and I had 120 new clients in 2020. So that's a lot. And that was being I started discovering by mid like by about July it was too much for me and I had to back back it off and say I can't see that many new people. And the reason I'm saying this is because I believe that was part of the what led into the crisis of my health is that I was normally able to handle have a certain amount of people. And I did my own energy work, so it was fine. And then suddenly, people with so much trauma were coming, they had really deep, intense traumas. And I was doing everything I could to help. And I was like, I can't see this many people because I'm just like, I literally would, would go on a walk to try to get grounded after reading someone. And I was my eyes were blurry, sometimes for an hour, like I couldn't see clearly, it was so much. And so I started seeing less people I saw, like, I went from 12 people a week to nine people a week. And then I went from, and then I was like, that still didn't work. So two months later, I said, I'm not seeing clients for two months until I feel about better. And so that's sort of the backstory of what led up to this. And so like, I was actually thinking, okay, and all that was happening emotionally and energetically in me. And then around the end of Thanksgiving, I started feeling funny, like, oh, like, my hip feels weird. And my knee feels weird, but I didn't do anything to it. And over the course of about three weeks, they started getting more inflammation and like sore, and I was having a hard time sleeping. And then suddenly, at the Grand mutation, this beautiful astrological event that happened in 2020, where we sort of moved into the Age of Aquarius, I woke up and I couldn't walk. Because I didn't know why. I didn't know why. But I had crawled into the kitchen, and was like, What is going on with me? You know, I don't know. But I'm going to urgent care. So that that's where it began. And I went to urgent care. And they didn't have any answer. I mean, they just sent me to this test and that test. And before the end of the day, I had gone to four different doc like three, at least three different doctors. And they all had the answer of we're not sure what's going on. And, and then at the recommendation of the last doctor, I saw who was an orthopedic doctor, he said, You got to get to a rheumatoid doctor. But I live in an area where so many people have moved in that the first rheumatoid doc I called couldn't see me for six months. Second one couldn't see me for four months. So I got into one a month later. Luckily, and it wasn't an actual doctor, it was attack of rheumatoid tech. And, and was very clear that based on the numbers and stuff that I had, psoriatic arthritis was just an autoimmune type of arthritis that deteriorates your bones and joints, and causes them to basically quit working and be very painful and turns into a handicap very often very quickly. So, man, that was a lot. But that's it in a nutshell. The story at least

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:07:52

that's, that's so much, that's so much, because that was almost like that was a couple years ago, like almost two and a half years ago. And I can't imagine waking up and not being able to feel like not being able to walk. And I wonder if the significance of that day. And then also, you know, you taking on all of this other energy when people start to come see you more frequently at the beginning of the pandemic? Like how that all plays into it, like, is this autoimmune disease genetic? Like, how does? How do you? How did you get? Well, I have a little theory

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:08:25

that I mean, this is a side, this is a side rabbit trail. So I have a little theory that people that are highly empathic have a lot higher chance of having having autoimmune diseases, not just because of not because of genetics, but because we have a big lesson from early in life, not understanding of whether what we're feeling is us or someone else, because we empathically feel everybody's energy all the time. And that then affects our nervous system. And it's trying to decide, Is it me? Or is it somebody else? Am I depressed? Am I angry? Am I in pain? Or is that the person standing next to me in line, a group at the grocery store? And autoimmune diseases are the body's being confused and attacking itself? So I feel like there's some energetic correlation between the two. But for me, it was like, Yes, I had all these boundaries. I'm like, the boundary clean, you know, when it comes to this work, and it still happened to me, it was like the cry, the stress that I didn't understand, I thought, Oh, no big deal. I've been doing zoom for years, everybody's gone to zoom on, you know, like, I've already I'm already there. You know, all these things that other people felt were disruptions in the pandemic were no big deal for me, but the amount of pain in the world was, it was very hard to manage and a lot of other healers I know have had diseases kick in during this time because they're trying to help other people heal on it's hard. Wow, oh,

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:09:51

there's so many directions that we can take this conversation like thank you so much for sharing and like, I'm very, very interested in learning more about that. Like, the energy and the empathic, you know, person taking on energy not because I'm an empath, as well. But I think what I really want to know is, so you get this diagnosis, your life is farming and act like you need your legs. Yeah. For you to be able to walk. You know, what is the prognosis for someone with this autoimmune disease? And like what were like what happened next for you?

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:10:27

So yeah, what happened next for me was that the first appointment was no big deal, because she just named something that I didn't. I mean, she didn't explain it to me, she just said, oh, yeah, all this tests and this, that, that, that that all point to that, but we're gonna do a few more tests just to see if it really is that and what kind of that it is, you know, what kind of that psoriatic arthritis is, is if you're in the percentile, that it affects your spine, if you're this or that. And so they did all these extra tests and sent me home with prednisone with the steroid and I, the steroid sort of helped. But as soon as I went off of it, it was back to square one, it didn't arrest the this, this cycle. And I was three weeks later back at my doctor. And then I got the news that really the detailed news, I've done some research and I started talking to people and realizing what really this meant for my life and my body that it wasn't just something, oh, you've got a diagnosis. So you can do something was like you've got a diagnosis. And here's the prognosis. You have to take a immune suppressant for the rest of your life that you inject in your body, because that's the easiest way for your body to take it once a week. And it might make your stomach upset, and your immune system is going to be suppressed to rest of your life. And the literally, this is the way it was explained to me like, well, there's one that we can give you and in three months, if it's not working, and we test you every month, and we're gonna give you another one, if it doesn't work, and we test you every month, for three months, then we'll give you the one that really works. But your insurance company won't pay for it until we proven the other two don't work. And it's $50,000 a year for the rest of your life. And I was like I'm gonna shoot myself, you know, like a chemo drug in my, you know, like, every week to suppress my immune system for the rest of my life. What's worth living for, at this point, I'm sort of a, you know, pragmatic person, like I don't want to live in, I know why my soul is here. And if it can't do what it's here for, I'm not that interested in sticking around. I'm not like going to off myself or something. But when you look at a picture like this, and your life is going Holy Cow one, I'm going to be in pain to this, the people that are doing this path haven't some of them that works for and some of them it doesn't half of them it doesn't. And they're still getting back surgeries, like my two friends that are five years older than me are major triple disc back surgeries because their backs deteriorating, and they're, you know, there are double hip replacements are needed. So it's scary stuff. And I went into a real I don't know if I want to call it a dark night of the soul. Because I've been through a few of those. This one was more like a tough inner sense of like, why am I here? What do I want to be here for? And am I willing to tolerate this bullshit,

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:13:18

like, like a dark horizon of the soul, like,

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:13:21

I was like, so pissed in a way at the universe, and it my body for holding this secret for so long, because it's genetic. And then the free part freeing part was getting, I didn't do anything wrong. In fact, it's amazing that I made it to 50. Before this kicked in most people it kicks in at 30 or 40. And I was lucky to that it didn't kick in until 50. But not just lucky. I did a lot of healthy things for my body to help delay it, you know?

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:13:47

So what did you choose to do? Which door did you go down? ABC $50,000 a year? I'm glad I mean, you. Door. I want to hear about this, like Narnia, right? You like went into

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:14:00

the like, I'm so blessed. The universe is magical. I don't know how but it just happened. So well. I was going through this diagnosis process. You know, because I'm teaching I teach in what I call empaths strength training for other people that are highly psychic and empathic, that aren't trying to become professional readers but want to understand themselves. And so I have a lot of students, and one of my students and clients was like, you know, obviously highly intuitive herself. She was like I'm in Mexico getting cancer treatment at this clinic and this doctor can help you I don't know what you've got, but I believe he can help you and come to stay with me in Mexico. I have an extra room in my Airbnb. I speak Spanish come just come on, just get a ticket and I was like, I don't even know what I have going on with my body yet. And she's like, come and I was like, Okay, wait, hold on. So then I get the diagnosis and the prognosis. And I'm going well the next question I asked my doctor is based on my X rays, do I have any deterioration yet? And she said, No. And I said, Oh, well, then before I start injecting myself with immune suppressants, I'm going to try something different. And I might, someday I'm not, I'm not rejecting that as a possibility, but I don't. It wasn't a yes for me. And so I decided to listen to my inner guidance and go to Mexico, where they can do a kind of stem cell treatment and what they call immunomodulation, where they reset your immune system through many steps, and give you the type of stem cells, they're not allowed to give people in the United States. And within six weeks after my first treatment, I didn't have any pain medication anymore. And five months later, when I right before I went back for my second treatment, my my inflammation markers is what you track and your blood were down to, they'd been up in that high risk of, you know, high risk, and they were down to the middle of average risk. And I, you know, I've been there for twice for treatment, and then we just wait and see. And so far, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It worked. It worked. I'm not living in pain. I haven't been on an eight pain medication, you're

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:16:14

farming, you're bombing,

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:16:17

I'm working life, I'm doing my life. But it didn't mean that I didn't lose trust in my body. I had, it's been a slow process to read, to regain trust in my body, because it's a scary experience when you're like, Oh, what if I go on a bike ride? And it like, deteriorates my cartilage and my bones? No, it's scary. It's really scary. So I just had been baby steps to rebuild the trust in my body with a physical therapist with Pilates with that low impact stuff, you know?

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:16:49

W ow. What a story. So you just your gut, did your gut just say go to Mexico, you have nothing to lose base? Well,

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:16:58

I am an analytical psychic, because I worked in tech for 22 years. So I'm not just your average woowoo. I like woo. But I'm also like, and what are the facts? We live on earth with gravity, we have to deal with real things like I get

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:17:14

it. Yeah, I like science. I like whoo, like I'm a willow Jew.

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:17:18

So it's like I'm i So my point was like, I felt into, like I did my own read on what this this doctor and what the doctor had to offer. And but I also was I it was a huge leap of intuitive faith, because a while I did the research, and I had a friend that was like, has rheumatoid arthritis that did a whole bunch of research on this type of treatment that was also telling me that, you know, they'd been researching it for six months in Thailand and the US in like it were all the different places in the clinics in the world, and really gave me a lot of good data. I was like, I gotta do this, I have to try this first. My intuition was like, I have to try this first, it was still not cheap. It was like $16,000, which is a lot of money. But when you think of spending 50 Every year, I mean, like with health insurance in the US, that would have meant I was just maxing out my health insurance every year, which is going to be at least $10,000 deductible. So it was like a no brainer. Like even if it just saves me two years of pain and my life gets to be happy for two years, I'm going you know, you have

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:18:27

to go back and get more treatment. Well, the

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:18:31

the legacy, like the people that they've tracked, this has only really been a thing for about eight years.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:18:37

So you're new in it. There's people ahead of you. There's people ahead

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:18:41

of me, but not a lot. They started doing it about eight years ago, small scale and then so there's but yeah, that are not have not had to go back for more treatment. Wow. But I'm also aware, like in my processes, like also, one, I've had another friend that was farther along in her process, go with me for the same treatment the second time, and then she went back on her own. And she had like, she went off some major heavy duty pain medications for about six months, and then it all started coming back. So there's not a guarantee.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:19:17

Right? And that's just like, that's like everything, there is no guarantee. And there's a lot of like science versus intuition and like knowing what's there, but there's nothing like no two people are the same. Yeah.

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:19:29

And that's what I wanted to say there's many paths to healing. And I don't judge the people that took the path of the injection once a week because they trusted it and it works for them. And that's the only one that they had a solution to. It's actually they've come quite a huge way in what they can do to treat rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis in the last 20 or 30 years. In our Western medical system, I have no judgment. I want people to be on their own healing path, you know, but for me, it was It wasn't my Half. And there. The thing I guess I wanted to touch on Blair is that there's other things that were going on for my healing besides the doctors. And but I need to stop talking for a minute. So you can say

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:20:16

just mesmerized by your story because, well, I mean, right now I like I'm fairly healthy, but I just lost my mother to cancer. She died after a three week battle, like didn't feel good. Fast that fast. Oh, yeah. Like she wasn't feeling good from November like last November to last February. Like that's like she wasn't feeling good in November by Jen. Like, she pushed and pushed for more tests. And by January, she learned, they finally got her into tests. And she learned she had cancer. They told her she'd be fine and get treatment. And she died three weeks later. And my father in law that happened to him three months prior, he wasn't feeling good. And then all of a sudden, they're like, you have cancer. And then the day he was supposed to start chemo who died. And my dad like my dad did it himself. Like my dad. He, like lived with addiction. But he died for like three months ago. So we had we lost three parents in their 60s. And my dad passed away because he had co young lung cancer. Yeah. And so my aunt actually today her is her urine site, which I'm Jewish. And the Hebrew calendar is different than the like sun calendar. And it's so funny because I had this really strong pole, like I wrote a speech from my mom's Memorial, and I messaged my uncle just because I was thinking of him. And he's like, Oh, it's our ads, like auntie, Heather's your insights, and I felt very, like, pulled in. But she died when she was in her 50s I'm like, wow, the genetics in my family. I mean, I stopped drinking. So like, I know addiction, like, you know, drug and alcohol addiction is things we

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:21:48

can influence. And then we can't like this was out of left field. I was healthy. I was active. I mean, I don't drink much. I don't do any thing. That's

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:21:57

a thing, right? Like my mom was. My mom was pretty healthy. She had a very high stress life, being a single mother who's like, husband, like, develop, like a severe addiction and left the family in shambles. But there's things you can control. There's things you can't, but watching what hap what happened to Dave, my father in law, and my mom who both didn't have a chance to retire, who got sick. And then three weeks later, like got, like, noticeably sick and then died. It's like, what can we do while we're healthy? But then, you know, hearing, you know, my mom's story and your story, it's like, you could do all the things you want. But there's certain things that just happen. It's like, it's more like, what do you do with that information?

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:22:38

Yeah, and what are the different to me, it's like, because of the I always go to like, what are like, go to sort of the alternative perspectives first, and then I go to the mainstream perspectives, because I figure that mainstream mainstream perspectives are easy to get answers on, but the alternative ones are more, you know, and, and a lot of people I had readings from people, I highly rec respect that it couldn't have no clue what was going on with me. It just, I mean, interesting. You know,

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:23:08

I mean, your story is obviously going to be all of our stories are always unfolding. But you're, you're a few years in so I'm,

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:23:13

I'm really only a year in. I mean, I it was January of 2021, that I got my diagnosis. And I went to treatment in March of 2021. And then again in August of 2021. And so it I just had my one year anniversary, since my first my first treatment, and I'm just like, looking back at what I was doing last year during this time and thinking oh, like I planted all this lavender, right. And, you know, I'm out there harvesting it like an hour and a half each day before I go to work when it's cooler in the morning. And I was able to do it. And it was such a like a personal win, even though it's a very slow process last year to be able to just go out there and cut lavender. And for an hour and a half. You know, it was

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:24:02

also probably very healing to write like labs. Yes. I could keep talking to you for hours. So we're gonna have to just maybe have you back on because I have I would like to keep everyone listening up to date on your progress. Maybe before we wrap up. I think we can go a couple different ways. But I would love for you to share advice. For someone who's maybe on a similar path. Maybe they got recently diagnosed with something and they're looking for alternative ways to heal I'm not sure. But you are a wealth of information and knowledge and I'd love for you to share some advice to our listeners to someone who may be in a similar boat that you were

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:24:43

in. Yeah, and whether it's what I'm facing in this autoimmune or something else. My number one thing is diagnosis is are wonderful because they help us feel secure. Like here's the data, but prognosis is are in If you are what's happened to other people, it's not a set outcome. And so I really encourage people to recognize they can go, I believe that I'm happy for the diagnosis, I have the information. But the prognosis, I don't have to follow the beliefs of whatever someone's telling me is the outcome for what's happening in my body. Because other people are trying to be helpful. Doctors are using information, they have to say, something they think is going to be helpful, but it may not be helpful for you, you know, so I just invite you to consider whether the prognosis is something you want to buy into or not. And my the other piece for me is there's something I call spiritual genetic inheritance. And what I realized before I went to my first treatment, after I had committed, I was going to Mexico for this treatment. And I had this aha moment of where did this come from? In my genetics? Oh, my mother's father, who I know the least he had, he died when I was young. And I asked my mom and she goes, Oh, yeah, he, he had such bad arthritis. He couldn't, he had to turn his whole shoulders, because he couldn't turn his head for years before he died. And he only died, like in the 60s. And I went, Oh, well, I know where it came from him and lineage. And as an intuitive, I spent some time in meditation, feeling into that family lineage and going, what is the pattern? When did it start in my family line, and when my belief in the way I work with my, my intuitive work is that if we can go back to where it started, we can see what created it and break the cycle. So we don't have to keep carrying that on down the line. And so that's what was my big aha was like I found where it started. And our, on our family, tree and my own, using my intuition and my guidance. And I and I just I brought it back. Look, we're at to where I was. And I said, I'm ending this, I'm no longer participating in the programming that says, this is part of my life, and my body and my future, any future generations. And I needed to do that. I really know that if I hadn't done that the treatments that I went through, wouldn't have actually stayed or worked for me. Because there's stuff beneath the physical or that's keeping us from healing, you know?

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:27:27

Wow, that's really important advice. Both of those things. Do you help people with that? Like in your job?

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:27:34

Um, yeah, I've seen a lot of people with terminal like, cancers and infertility and things like that and looked at what's blocking them and where we can help them heal energetically. I'm actually sort of one of my clients is a rheumatoid doctor, and she got to hear me talk shit about all this. And she gave me some good advice, too.

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:27:55

Wow. Oh my gosh, okay. Where can people find you if they're like, whoa, Natalie's amazing, I want to follow her journey I want to consumer information. I'm an empath and I need some more Natalie in my life, how can people find you? Well,

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:28:09

I am, you can find me at following the divine mystery on Facebook or follow the divine mystery on Instagram, I have a book called tame your energy sensitivity, which is a really quick read, you can read it if you're fast reader maybe in a day or two. But the point is, you're supposed to be able to go back and fish through it and grab what you need out of it. To help you understand if you're an empath, or sensitive person. You know, what you can do to set your energy boundary so you're not absorbing other people's stuff all the time. And you can also find me on Abberley cuts fourth.com I have a little freebie for your folks, if you don't mind, I have something called fresh energy fast with it, which is a 10 day method for you to help identify what of the 14 different types of energy leaks are affecting you by just using this little daily journal to check off who you're interacting with and what's happening energetically with them. And then there's an audio to help you set your boundaries that comes with it. And there's a couple of tools once you realize how your energy is being leaked to stop it. So that's, I'm gonna give you the link for that Blair fresh energy fast and the code that is to get it for free is I am resilient. I mean, what's best for you?

Blair Kaplan Venables: 00:29:34

Okay, so it's all going to be in the show notes. You can click her links, you can you know, get her freebie. I'm really excited to get your book because I'd love to learn how to protect my energy and my boundaries. And I just want to thank you so much for sharing your story with us and I know you're just at the beginning of your your journey, and I think it's going to be really beautiful to walk alongside you You in this, you know in this version of life that we're in and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to another episode of radical resilience. Remember, it's totally okay to not be okay. We're all human beings doing our thing living our life. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel. You got this. Thank you, Natalie. Thank you listeners.

Natalie Cutsforth: 00:30:24

My pleasure, and I hope everybody gets the healing they need