Episode 19 - A Holistic Approach to Travel, Nutrition and Health

Embark with Rita and myself on an enthralling exploration of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico—where a curtain of darkness from a city-wide blackout veiled our path, yet opened our eyes to the profound lessons of safety and vulnerability encountered while traveling. We're then joined by an extraordinary guest, Colleen O'Neill Mulvihill, whose transition from the adrenaline-fueled life of a firefighter to a serene path as a holistic health and wellness coach paints an inspiring narrative. Together, we unravel the common fears that shackle many to their comfort zones and illuminate how embracing the unknown can redefine our perspective on well-being and the world.

As the conversation unfolds, we delve into Colleen's innovative mission to embolden women over 40 to intertwine the restorative art of travel with their wellness journeys. We confront the often challenging reality of maintaining healthy habits upon returning home and share actionable insights into the profound impact that local food sourcing and embracing nature can have on our health. Colleen's transformative retreat to Ecuador serves as a beacon, reminding us all of the sheer vitality of integrating movement and the outdoors into our daily practices. Tune in for a heartfelt discussion that transcends the simple act of travel, guiding us toward a life brimming with balance, joy, and discovery.

https://holistichealthtraveler.com/
https://themindbodysoulcoach.com/

Chapters

• 0:19 An Update on San Miguel
• 4:12 Introducing Colleen Mulvihill
• 11:22 Empowering Wellness Through Travel Coaching
• 21:27 Mind, Body and Soul

Transcript

Jim Santos: 0:19

Welcome to Travels with Jim and Rita. With Jim and Rita, I'm your host, jim Santos, and in this podcast series you can follow along as my wife Rita and I work out our crazy plan to outfox the real estate market in the US and actually increase our retirement nest egg by spending the next three years or so living abroad and exploring the world. Are we bold, forward-thinking pioneers or just plain nuts? Let's find out together, shall we? Hello everybody and welcome. I'm Jim here with my lovely wife Rita, and this is Travels with Jim and Rita. We're still in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico just one more week to go and we've been having a great time. We found a beautiful park, toured an old fabric factory that's been converted to an art center, and took a tour of two lovely local homes, to name just a few outings. The locals have been friendly, the food fantastic and there's a decent sprinkling of North American expats around as well. Our only complaint so far is the unusual heat wave still affecting the area. But before we get to our guest, I want to tell a quick story, since the subject of safety comes up so often when discussing foreign travel.

Jim Santos: 1:34

Something interesting happened a few nights ago. We met some friends of ours who live here at a restaurant about a mile from where we're staying. We took a cab down and planned to walk back, since it would be after sunset and much cooler. We had a wonderful time and a delicious dinner, but after our meals, while we were sitting around talking, the lights suddenly went out. Everyone in the restaurant took it in stride, and our friends assured us that it would be back on soon. Well, after about a half hour of chatting in the dark, it was getting noticeably warmer in the restaurant now that the fans were no longer turning, so we decided to call it a night and set out for the walk home. It was then that we realized that it was not just our block, but the power was out in a major portion of the city. We started off on the cobblestone streets in the dark and, like others around us, we used our cell phone flashlights. Streets in the dark and, like others around us, we used our cell phone flashlights. It was an interesting walk. The city looks different in the dark and we couldn't always see the street signs, so we proceeded by guess and by gosh, working our way back to our apartment.

Jim Santos: 2:35

About halfway home, I thought about how unusual this was for a North American. Here we were walking through the dark streets of a Mexican town and feeling perfectly safe. We weren't alone on the streets. Many people stepped outside of their homes to catch the breeze and there were many others out walking, but there was no sense of panic or danger at the blackout. Everyone took it in stride. There was no spontaneous looting and no one was running wild. Anyway, the power came back on when we were about a block from our home and we were soon back in our unit. None the worse for the adventure, but it got me thinking about safety abroad again.

Jim Santos: 3:12

Mexico in particular has a bad reputation with most Americans, and I'm not trying to say that there's not violent crime in this country, but that doesn't mean that there are not places where you can feel at ease. Refusing to visit Mexico, or any other country for that matter, because you've heard news stories about crime there is, in my opinion anyway, a bit of an overreaction. Mexico is a very large country with a wide variety of locations and experiences. To me, saying I'm not going to visit Mexico at all is like saying I'm never going to Michigan because there's crime in Detroit. Okay, well, let me climb down from my soapbox now and we can start the show. Our guest today is Colleen O'Neill Mulvihill. She's a former firefighter and has a host of certifications, including holistic health and wellness coach, holistic nutritionist, a travel coach and several more credentials. She's also a published travel writer and is joining us from her home in rural Vermont. Colleen, welcome to Travels with Jim and Rita and thanks for agreeing to speak with us.

Colleen Mulvihill: 4:12

Thank you, it's awesome to be here.

Jim Santos: 4:15

Now you've got quite a list of accomplishments and certifications, but I imagine you weren't always involved in wellness and travel. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself before you started this?

Colleen Mulvihill: 4:27

Sure, absolutely, yeah, you're absolutely right with that. I grew up in a family of firefighters and I followed in my dad's footsteps and became a career firefighter. Wow, yeah, I did that career for right around 30 years.

Rita Santos: 4:43

Wow.

Colleen Mulvihill: 4:44

I did that career for right around 30 years, Wow, and you know, through that, that is what planted the seed for me to become health conscious and know that I had to be strong and fit you know, healthy in order to survive a career in the fire service. So that's what kind of planted the seed. Yeah.

Jim Santos: 5:01

So what started you on the journey, then, towards holistic wellness and holistic travel?

Colleen Mulvihill: 5:07

So I thought I knew what it took to become healthy. I hit the gym five days a week, I did some you know running and and exercising, and I ate what I thought was a pretty pretty good diet. And lo and behold, in my 40s I woke up one morning with such severe wrist and hand pain that it really literally brought tears to my eyes as I brushed my teeth and I thought I had worked out really hard in the gym and I overdid it. So I decided to just take a few rest days and, you know, try to get better. And the pain didn't get better, it actually ended up getting worse.

Colleen Mulvihill: 5:51

So, long story short, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and that was quite a wake up call for me, because no one in my family had suffered from any autoimmune diseases. So it was because no one in my family had suffered from any autoimmune diseases. So it was not something that I ever saw coming for me personally and that really kind of precipitated the conversation with my inner self, like you know. I thought I was doing everything the right way. So what's missing?

Colleen Mulvihill: 6:19

So I went back to one of my favorite college classes actually, which was Health and Wellness 101, where I learned things like food is medicine, and I learned about the mind-body-soul connection and I just really started to take a deep dive into that because I wanted to find a way to heal my body naturally. At the time, the only options that I had through my rheumatologist were really heavy immunosuppressant drugs. And I, you know, doing the job that I was doing, working in a fire station, I was around, you know, people that were sick and people that were injured, and I was around carcinogens and I was around things that the average person isn't typically exposed to, and the thought of being put on a drug that was suppressing my immune system even further while doing that job, it just it terrified me. So I was determined to find another way and that's really the kind of the starting point for me launching into a whole body healing approach.

Jim Santos: 7:24

Well, I can understand your concern. My first wife died of cancer and she got on such a medication regimen. It seemed like you took one drug that had these side effects, so you took another drug for those side effects and then that did something else, so you took something else to try to balance that and it's kind of a slippery slope once you start trying to treat the symptoms instead of trying to get to the root of the problem.

Colleen Mulvihill: 7:47

It absolutely is, and it's an unfortunate situation, especially in the United States, where, you know, doctors are trained to do two things they're trained to give you a diagnosis and they're trained to match that diagnosis with a medication that will help you manage those symptoms. And that's really about as far as the healthcare system goes, which I often tease and refer to it. It's really not healthcare, it's more like sick care. I think that there's so much missing with the natural healing approach. Nobody teaches doctors about nutrition and mind, body, soul connections and those sorts of things. So that's where my passion comes from. I just feel like that's such a missing aspect of healing that a lot of people are just not, unfortunately not taking advantage of because they're not, they don't have any support to do so.

Rita Santos: 8:44

Don't you think, though, that in other countries, they do take the whole concept, your whole body concept and mind concept together? They do. Yeah, that seemed like that was our case when we lived in Ecuador, that they would talk to us for maybe 45 minutes about our entire life, what we were doing, how we felt, you know, how our families were what you're eating and how you're sleeping.

Rita Santos: 9:09

Yeah, all of that. Where in the US they're interested in getting you out in 15 minutes, so here, take a pill and come back in a month or whatever. Yeah it's.

Colleen Mulvihill: 9:23

It's quite interesting when you start digging into how these medical schools are funded, and in large part they're funded by pharmaceutical drug companies. So there's your connection right there, and I truly believe that most allopathic Western medicine doctors they truly do want their patients to get better.

Jim Santos: 9:44

Oh sure.

Colleen Mulvihill: 9:45

Right. You know that. So it's this isn't. You know, I'm not trying to slam doctors. I think they're doing the best that they can and and they're they're doing what they can based on the training that they have learned through medical school. Um, but I just think that it's unfortunate because, just as you said in Ecuador, a lot of other countries do have this down. I mean, this is the way they healed it. You know, thousands and thousands of years ago. You know ancient Chinese medicine and you know Hippocrates and all of those in history that knew there was something more than taking a medication that was healing to the body, and I think we need to just kind of get more back to our roots, honestly.

Jim Santos: 10:31

Maybe we should get to basics here first of all and define exactly what you mean when you say that you're going to heal everything.

Colleen Mulvihill: 11:01

It's really the interconnectedness of your mind, your body and your soul that really creates the foundation to support your entire being. So if any one of those aspects of your being is not being nourished properly, that's when we start to see disease or illness come into being.

Jim Santos: 11:22

So when you talk about well, for instance, you have a group coaching community that's called Audacious Tenacity Sisterhood of Strength, understanding goals to empower women over 40 on their holistic wellness journey. I imagine things like nutrition and food are also a big part of that.

Colleen Mulvihill: 11:38

It absolutely is part of that and you know I talk to my clients a lot about their whole being and how things like wellness travel can really kind of set the foundation for whatever it is that they're trying to achieve in their own personal health and well-being.

Colleen Mulvihill: 11:57

But once you've gone to a wellness travel destination and maybe you have learned how your body responds to things that you've never tried before everything from deep relaxation to maybe you've tried yoga for the first time or you've eaten a plant-based meal for the first time and you see how wonderful that is for your body then you come home. You need the foundation and you need the coaching to kind of help you integrate those pieces that you learned about in through your wellness travel into your day to day life. I have found that my clients biggest struggle is their environment. We become such creatures of habit. You know everything from you know getting out of bed at the same time or the same way every morning to what we do day to day. Sometimes we go through our mornings specifically and we don't even remember, you know brushing our teeth or we don't even remember pouring our first cup of coffee, those sorts of things. So it becomes super ingrained in our being, and trying to incorporate new habits into your home environment can be pretty challenging without some pretty deep support.

Jim Santos: 13:11

Well, it can also be a challenge. Well, one of the things that we've noticed with travel is that you find that in a lot of countries the food source is much closer, or the food is much closer to the source. We're getting much fresher fruits and vegetables, and you can tell the taste, you can tell by the way you feel. But then there are people who popularize things like the Mediterranean diet, and that's fine if you're in the Mediterranean, but if you're in the US trying to live that Mediterranean diet, you're still going to end up buying processed foods or foods that have been brought from far away and had something done to them. So how do you try to incorporate that into your life once you're, once you're back in your normal environment?

Colleen Mulvihill: 13:52

Yeah, that's. That's a very good point, jim. It is challenging, first and foremost, to eat seasonally, because I think if we eat seasonally it's one, more available, two, more economical, typically, and three, your body responds really well to the same things that are in season. In other words, when we try to eat something like watermelon in winter, watermelon is very cooling and very hydrating and it's in the summertime, when we're sweating more, when we're in a climate that's a little bit more warm, that we need those sorts of minerals that are in something like watermelon. So eating seasonally is a really good place to start.

Colleen Mulvihill: 14:39

I also teach my clients what foods are important to purchase organically versus which okay to purchase traditionally or conventionally. Because, you know, for a lot of them, money is an issue and it does unfortunately cost more money to eat healthy, which again is something that you know drives me nuts about the US. We actually our government subsidizes food that is low quality, that is purposely cheap, and nobody's out there saying, hey, we need a broccoli organization that's going to go to Congress and talk about the benefits of broccoli, that's going to go to Congress and talk about the benefits of broccoli, but we're really strong at allowing, you know, the meat and the dairy and those sorts of industries to promote their products and get government funding to subsidize what they're doing.

Jim Santos: 15:36

Right. The US seems to be the opposite of a lot of the countries that we visited. Where you know, the US is cheaper to buy a box of macaroni and cheese that's incredibly processed than it is to just buy a few peaches.

Rita Santos: 15:48

Yeah, because it's so cheap.

Jim Santos: 15:50

Like in Mexico. Here, for instance, we go to the local mercado and buy fruits and vegetables, and even stop by the local butcher shops and get fresh meats, and they tend to be cheaper. The healthier food tends to be cheaper here than the processed foods because that's brought in from elsewhere. So is that part of what you mean by wellness travel?

Colleen Mulvihill: 16:10

So through wellness travel, it's important for me to first understand what my clients are struggling with. For some of them, it's not as much a physical transformation that they're after, it's more a kind of a personal transformation. So knowing what their deepest desires are, in regards to whether it's personal growth or healing or just rejuvenation, those sorts of things helps me to match them with not only a destination but an environment within that destination that will encourage them to take that step towards understanding the way that that can help them catapult towards their growth, if that makes sense. So it's a very individualized thing that I do with my clients, because what works for me and what my body needs, what the outcomes are or what the desired outcomes are, and how that person wants to be able to incorporate those aspects into their life once they return home.

Jim Santos: 17:37

So it sounds like in your efforts as a travel coach, you're starting by kind of building a rather detailed profile of the person themselves.

Colleen Mulvihill: 17:46

That's correct. I do build a very detailed profile. We talk about all of those aspects. We talk about how they nourish their mind, how they nourish their body. You know what aspects of their soul might be kind of pushed to the back burner. I know a lot of us when we were children. We loved certain aspects of what we did when we were kids, whether it's playing in nature or doing art or those sorts of things and in most people's lives we tend to put those things on the back burner and call them unnecessary because they don't create money for us, they don't contribute to our family. So we've pushed those aspects of ourselves really far back and kind of going digging deep and realizing what brings us joy is a really important part of what we do prior to going on a wellness travel trip.

Rita Santos: 18:47

Colleen, I'm interested in hearing how your clients find you for your service.

Colleen Mulvihill: 18:54

That's a great question. So I am a part of something called the Travel Coach Network, something called the Travel Coach Network. As you're probably aware, travel coaching is a relatively new field. Coaching has been around for decades, but travel coaching specifically is a relatively new aspect of coaching. So through the Travel Coaching Network, which is also where I'm certified, there's a, there's a database of travel coaches in there. So if someone wants to specifically look for, for instance, a women's solo travel coach to teach them how to travel safely solo, then you could find that in that database. But for me personally, I also I have a website, I have my social media and I try to get blog posts up as frequently as I can once I find travel destinations that I think people will really kind of take interest in. So those are the ways.

Rita Santos: 20:01

Are most of your clients women, solo women, looking to learn new ways to travel.

Colleen Mulvihill: 20:07

Yeah, so they are mostly women. Their backgrounds vary from wanting healing aspects or wanting to really kind of take control of their overall health and well-being. Take control of their overall health and wellbeing. I start. I have started a an autoimmune coaching practice because of my own personal challenges with struggling with an autoimmune disease. So a lot of the clients start with me in autoimmune coaching and what I do is I. I have created a four-step plan and the last of those four steps involves exploration, and when I speak of exploration I think of inner exploration, like we talked about some of those things that we used to bring us joy.

Colleen Mulvihill: 20:55

That we need to reincorporate in our life, and also external exploration, which is where the wellness travel comes in, and also external exploration, which is where the wellness travel comes in. So they do come to me from multiple different places, but each one comes with a personal struggle that is very unique to them. And you know, that's what I love about. It's kind of like doing a little archaeological dig to try to get to know the person, the whole person, because I really truly do believe in individualized support Right.

Jim Santos: 21:27

Do you actually travel with your clients or do you just set up an itinerary for them?

Colleen Mulvihill: 21:31

So I don't even set up the itinerary. That's the beauty of this. So what? What they do is they come to me with a list of things that they they want to have in their life, to me with a list of things that they want to have in their life, whether they're goals or feelings they want to incorporate through their travels, and I suggest things that will bring them closer to that aspect, and then they plan their own adventure based on the things that we've discovered together in our coaching relationship. So that makes me different than, say, a travel agent.

Colleen Mulvihill: 22:06

So I don't book travel for people. I just kind of open up their minds and their hearts to what could be possible for them If they did a wellness travel trip in this way and went to this destination, and I suggest places that match their goal in mind.

Jim Santos: 22:28

Right? Were there any particular destinations that you think helped you personally?

Colleen Mulvihill: 22:32

Well, I will say that I went to Ecuador myself several years ago and that, as you were speaking of earlier, was such an eye-opening experience for me. I didn't do a lot of traveling as a child. Our family traveled more locally. We didn't do any global travel. So going to a place like Ecuador and being in the rainforest and being near volcanoes and being in the Galapagos Islands and just seeing the different ways people lived and incorporated, like you were speaking of, the food, incorporated the walking, incorporated the natural environment into their day-to-day life, was like a light bulb moment for me, because we don't do that very well here in the US.

Jim Santos: 23:29

Right or at all.

Colleen Mulvihill: 23:31

Well, in some cases at all Correct.

Rita Santos: 23:34

We're such a big country that we're automobile driven.

Colleen Mulvihill: 23:39

Yeah, and it's almost funny that we take away all of the things that we know we should be doing out of our day-to-day lives and then we set them up as individual services that must be purchased. In other words, we don't move our bodies every day, so we have to purchase a gym membership in order to be able to do that.

Jim Santos: 23:58

Right, Right Drive to the gym and walk on a treadmill.

Colleen Mulvihill: 24:02

Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's a little bit of a backwards way of doing things, where we could just go outside and go for a walk, we could just go sit in nature, you know, and that a lot of that's been stripped away from a lot of communities in in this country as well. So, yeah, it's, it's kind of it's kind of a backwards way of doing things.

Jim Santos: 24:21

Well, let's talk about the mind-body-soul coaching. I assume that's based on your own experience with your autoimmune disease.

Colleen Mulvihill: 24:29

It is. Yeah, that's where I got the initial bug to really help other women, because I feel like women in this country are an underserved population when it comes to things like autoimmune disease anyway population when it comes to things like autoimmune disease anyway. A lot of women come to their doctors with just a bunch of different symptoms that don't seem to add up to much of anything and they'll go get blood work done. Their doctor will tell them their blood work looks fine, but they know something else is going on.

Colleen Mulvihill: 25:00

Without a diagnosis, sometimes women feel like I must be crazy or I mustn't, I must need to just sleep more or do better, right, but we really don't know how, how to make that happen. So that's kind of the basis of connecting the mind, body, soul with women who either know they have an autoimmune disease or suspect they might, or have some symptoms that are in alignment with an autoimmune disease.

Jim Santos: 25:30

And how would you go about coaching someone for this? I mean, what kind of services do you offer as part of that coaching program?

Colleen Mulvihill: 25:36

So I only ever offer one-on-one coaching because my coaching philosophy is deeply rooted in addressing, kind of the root cause of illness, and that root cause looks different for everyone, so that's why I only ever offer individualized plans. Some women are a little bit further along in their autoimmune journey and they have tried some things that have worked but haven't worked enough for them to really feel vibrant in their body again. So I offer two programs three month journey and a six month journey and what I'll do is I always chat with my potential clients for free for 30 minutes and I try to get a deep understanding of where they are in their journey and based on that then I'll recommend either a three-month journey or a six-month journey if they really want to incorporate the best of the holistic therapies the nutrition, the mindfulness practices, the lifestyle changes all of that stuff into their day-to-day life so that they can heal their immune system naturally.

Jim Santos: 26:50

Well, it seems like this could be of a benefit to someone who doesn't necessarily have an autoimmune problem but is just having, you know, just general difficulty in their life, problem sleeping, you know, frequent headaches, just anything that seems like they're not entirely healthy.

Colleen Mulvihill: 27:06

Yes, and, as a matter of fact, I am currently coaching someone who does not have an autoimmune disease. However, her mom has been diagnosed with several autoimmune diseases and she came to me wanting to go through this program as a way to avoid that what she would consider an eventual diagnosis. So she really wanted to try to get a hold of her natural healing abilities and really kind of set the tone for her new way of living her life so she doesn't end up like her mom. So, yeah, you're absolutely right, jim. I believe totally, 100%, to the core of my being, that our bodies know how to heal, but what we don't always know is how to allow that to happen.

Jim Santos: 28:00

How about things like stress management? Because it seems like an awful lot of the ills people normally face are over stress.

Colleen Mulvihill: 28:09

Yes, as a matter of fact, stress management is one of the four steps in my coaching program.

Colleen Mulvihill: 28:17

I teach my clients how to recognize their body's very first stress response, because we all have different levels of stress response and it's important to understand how our body presents with stress individually.

Colleen Mulvihill: 28:35

In other words, you know, I could feel it maybe in my neck and shoulders, where I know my daughter specifically she starts to get sweaty palms. That's her body's first response to stress. So it's in the recognizing of those stress responses that we can step in and do something different. So I teach all of my clients how to create their own kind of quick action stress relief response based on a number of things, based on you know where they are. In other words, you can do some different things at home than you might not be able to do at work. But there are ways to incorporate some stress reduction practices in the quiet of your office or whether you have to go to the ladies' room or the men's room and sit and breathe for a few minutes, those sorts of things. So we work together to kind of come up with a quick action plan that works for them specifically.

Jim Santos: 29:33

I know you can't break confidentiality, but can you tell us something about your favorite success story?

Colleen Mulvihill: 29:39

Yeah, so I can. One of my clients came to me and she was incredibly overweight. She knew needed to do better in her food choices, she needed to move her body better. But she, you know, was really very confused because there's so much information and a lot of it is misinformation on the internet. So we worked together for a couple of months and literally within one week of us working together, I could see a difference in her energy level, I could see a difference in the appearance of her skin and she literally said to me she said, oh my gosh, I knew this would work. She said I just never realized how quickly my body would respond to it. And those are the things that just light me up and make me so excited about doing what I do, because when a client can feel it in their own body and say this is working, it, just that's the reason I do what I do.

Jim Santos: 30:45

What are your plans and goals for the future now?

Colleen Mulvihill: 30:48

Well, I do want to continue with the autoimmune coaching and the travel coaching, but what I'd really like to also offer eventually is our wellness retreats specifically designed for women who want to embrace wellness and reclaim their their health and vitality. Because I do want to travel with a group of women, to be the leader, to kind of show them the things that maybe they wouldn't have done on their own through a wellness travel adventure that they curated. So that's coming, not exactly sure when, but that's part of what I would like to get to.

Jim Santos: 31:27

Well, we've been talking with Colleen O'Neill-Mulvihill about travel, nutrition, wellness and unlocking your inner potential for health. You can find out more by checking out her website holistichealthtraveler. com and www. themindbodysoulcoach. com. And don't worry, if you didn't get that, there'll be links in the show notes to both websites. Be sure and subscribe to her newsletter as well while you're there too. Well, colleen, thanks for joining us today on Travels with Jim and Rita, and congratulations on your efforts to help so many women.

Colleen Mulvihill: 32:01

Thank you so much.

Jim Santos: 32:02

It's been wonderful speaking with you both today Before we go, a reminder that Rita and I will be at the 2024 Ultimate Go Overseas Boot Camp, coming up in Las Vegas October 26th through 28th. I'll be giving a couple of presentations and we'll both be in the exhibit hall to answer questions about slow travel, the places we visited and our plans for the future. There'll be expats and experts from around the world and if you're interested in attending, check out intliving. com/ events for more information or to make reservations. That's intliving. com/ events. That's it for this week's show. Keep listening, keep spreading the word on social media and, if you can, please take a moment to leave a rating and review. And, of course, subscriptions are always welcome. If you have any questions or you'd like to tell your own story, email me at jim@ jimsantosbooks. com . You can also find my books and short stories on my Amazon page at jimsantos. net . So until next time, remember we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us.