Welcome back to the Adventures in Brain Injury Podcast! In this very special and short episode, I introduce Jacki D’Aries, and our partnership in the Empowered Neuro Community.

The Empowered Neuro Community is an online social platform and classroom that we’ve created to provide resources, therapy tools, instructional videos, and a supportive community for brain injury survivors, their loved ones, and as a resource for practitioners.

It is designed to be affordable with a free membership option. A paid version is also available for under $20/month, which provides additional access to live interviews, on demand classes, and practitioner connections.

So who is Jackie D’Aries, and why am I partnering with her?

Jacki has experience as an occupational therapist in various settings, from hospital to post acute. Like me and so many others, Jacki saw several gaps in the standard model of neurorehabilitation, which was unsettling. This became the inspiration behind creating an online program to support caregivers and survivors beyond traditional healthcare setting. This is what has now become Empowered Neuro, and for the forseeable future, we will be hosting a livew event every week.

Looking forward to seeing you in the community and at the next Feed a Brain School sessions on Tuesday!

we’re going to bring on Jackie, welcome you guys, to all of the things that we’re doing here. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the adventures in brain injury podcast. And welcome to empowered neuro, and welcome to fetal brain school. So this first class we are going to do as an interview. But Jackie, Jackie de Eris, and I met through a mutual client. And well, I’ll tell you more about the story of how we came together. But I just saw what she was building here, and really connected with who she is, and her heart and her drive and what she’s doing. And I’m so happy to be building this community with her. So welcome, Jackie.

Thank you The feeling’s mutual. Right when we connected it was also because we do jujitsu. So that was a an initial like, oh yeah, you’re cool. We’re gonna get along. Your your goals, your values, who you are. They’re very similar to mine. So we hit it off.

Yeah, Yep, absolutely. I mean, just your Well, what? What happened for me was going on your website, and just scrolling through, you know, reading about you and your values, and why don’t you tell us about your experience as an occupational therapist, and that brought you into creating what you’re creating what we’re creating? Yes,

yes, we’re a team now empowered neuro. So yeah, I’ve been an occupational therapist now for about eight years or so give or take. I started out originally working in all the hospital systems in kind of like the journey of recovery that most people have, right. When you get your injury, you go to acute care, and you’re not really doing much, but I worked in that setting. Then you go to the rehab setting. I worked a little bit there. Skilled nursing facilities, outpatient, I’d kind of did a little bit of everything. But I fell in love with neuro and just the acquired brain injury population in general, like traumatic brain injuries, strokes, tumors, things like that in the brain. So I started just specialized in the brain injury path. And I became a senior ot for the Kaiser Foundation rehab center, which is in Northern California. So I spent a lot of time there on the brain injury team. But that kind of led me down the path that I’m on now, which is where we got to me. Luckily, I had a lot of patients in the hospital and their families who I got really close with. And when they left, I couldn’t just say goodbye to them. So I stayed in touch. And almost all of them were saying, you know, we had such good rehab in the hospital systems, we had three to four hours every day, and then they went home and their therapy just slowly started to disappear. You know, they then had therapy once a week, that lasted a couple of months. And then they eventually had almost nothing. And I was really upset by that. And I started to try to help them more. So that’s when I decided, you know, what, there’s such a need in the community for more services. So I’m going to transition away from the hospital and try to help more of these people. So I started my own private practice. But then I realized too, that you know, I can only help so many people with my private practice, I have to kind of come up with a way that I can try to help more people. And you know, doing the research, there’s like 75% of caregivers report that they are overwhelmed and lack resources, and are struggling. And that number is just outrageous to me. So that’s where I started to think, Okay, let me try to develop some type of online program that I can help people. That’s where the Empowered neuro community started.

So yes, that is an extremely common story. I hear that all the time with brain injury, going through acute rehab, and getting this therapy and, you know, helping their loved going through the acute stages, which by the way, are very, very intense. There’s a lot of moving parts, and it’s a full time job just keeping up. And then it’s like, Alright, and now you’re good, go on. And they’re kind of like left out. And it’s like, oh, now where’s the roadmap? You know, where do I go with this. And I’ve seen it so many times. And that’s where like my work, working with clients, to help them optimize their recovery potential, by empowering themselves with what they can do to give themselves the best shot. And we’ve talked about my story, which is like, you know, what I realized is that I can control what I can control, I was lucky enough to be steered towards a nutritional protocol. And I was lucky enough to regain clarity through that protocol and healing my digestion and doing all this stuff. And then I trained in functional nutrition, in order to understand how this works and trained in functional neurology, in some degree to understand what I could do to give my brain the best shot to recover. And it’s so much of it when I’m working with with families is about like empowering ourselves, you know, what we can do to give ourselves the best shot to recover. And it’s absolutely true, like what empowerment comes down to is, is exactly what I’m saying what you can do. And what’s great about the internet is we can teach people what to do on a large scale and all over the world. And so when I saw what you put together, and we just connected on a really like deep spiritual place, and then came out and visited you in California, you and your husband both role jujitsu, which, which played a huge role in my recovery, mobile, put a pin in that, but basically, reestablishing my body maps understanding where I was in space and time, that huge role. And it’s amazing what you’ve created here and what we’re going to create with this moving forward with more classes. Well, let’s, let’s talk about that. So tell me about the resource that you’ve created. I understand why you did, what does it have to offer for community members?

Yeah,

it’s, it’s, there’s a lot in there, right, which everybody that’s in there. Now you can see there’s a lot going on already. So the goal of it was to, yes, provide people with resources, like therapy tools, instructional videos, but also to connect them with one another, right? Like, there are tons of social media platforms that can connect you with one another. But it’s not necessarily therapeutic, helping you progress in your recovery, kind of like what you were saying and what you went through with your recovery. Like you had to actually learn everything on your own. At some point, you lost that guidance, and you had to empower yourself and start studying and learning in order to get where you are today. And that resource does not exist, or did not exist, right until we started to get it going. So I want this platform to be yes, like teaching people how to recover but also like, you know, we only know so much as practitioners, right? Like, there’s only a limit, you know, to my knowledge and with my experience, so my goal for it was I want to bring in other practitioners, I want to bring in members of the community so that we can all teach one another. And then I met you, so it was kind of the perfect fit to bring on another practitioner. So the community does offer that right some therapy tools, guidance, communication with one another But then we also have the ability to host the live events, which we’re doing right now. So we will be teaching everybody through the live events, doing workshops, on all types of things could be high level cognitive skills, like financial management, getting back to cooking, things like that. But also, since we don’t know everything we can bring on other professionals. So lining up, you know, we’re gonna have some neuro psychologists come on and talk about a certain topic. So it can be really like any professional in the rehab field. If we don’t know it, we can just reach out to our network, get them on and have everybody’s questions answered.

Yeah, it’s about building this network. So first of all, how can people find this network? So you could just go to empowered neuro.com That’s probably the easiest way.

Perfect. So yeah, empowered neuro.com. And this is a huge place for community, bringing people in and we’re we’re also talking about, we’re firing back up the adventures and brain injury podcast, and bringing deaths on live for live interviews like this one, where we get to interview different specialists and rehabilitation and trician in neurology, and neuro optometry and all sorts of different modalities. And we get to then open it up for q&a For everybody who is on live. And so I’m really excited for that as well. And really excited our viewer here for LIVE q&a after this, we’ll open it up for questions. And we’re also going to be doing classes. So fetal brain school starts, I mean, technically, this is class one, a fetal brain school, but it felt like so important to introduce everyone to Jackie and the Empowered neuro communities that you know, what we’re building, why we’re building it, and what the future directions are of it. So let’s talk about that. What are some future directions that you see for empowered neuro? Gosh, they’re endless, right? We’ve talked about it all the time of all these ideas that we have with, you know, creating workshops and everything. But ideally, also, we want it to be driven by the community members, right? Because that’s the whole goal, it’s not really what we want to do. It’s what the members of the community need to get out of it. So of course, we’re going to be building out the workshops, building out all the live events, giving everybody access to practitioners. But really, we want to be hearing from everybody have, what resources do you need? What would you like to see out of the community, you know, the software platform can do so much. So really any idea we can kind of make it happen? So I’m really looking forward, forward to seeing where it goes. And another thing I forgot to mention, too, is that we’re doing a little book club that meets on some fun topics. I’m hopeful that we can have some caregiver guidance, more support trainings coming up. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to what the future is getting.

Yeah, the way I see this is, we’re really gelling. And I’m sure people in the audience can relate to this gap in health care, that exists, like we talked about, like where, especially in that transition from acute care to transitioning back into life, you know, and I actually, I was advisor for the brain injury, the movie was called the brain study the brain injury rehabilitation, improving transition experiment, they experience VR it, and it was a multi center study where we’re bringing people in, and some people will get the standard, go through and then get dropped off, basically. And then this did a little bit more to integrate people in. And even still, with that, I feel like this is really giving people the keys to you know, either be a part of this community and have access to the practitioners. I mean, I’m really hoping and my intentions are to build this exactly what you’re talking about, where we have those resources for people. And it really builds a gap as you know, as best we can to help people get the care they need and the guidance they need to empower themselves to recover most most optimally. And like you said, with community as well, is huge. I mean, I know, I know, people have forgotten walkers and you know, food and things like that from the communities is like this. Or like, Hey, I’m looking for this. No, I have one that I’m not using cool. Really useful. Yes.

And even like other practitioners in the area, you know, the traditional medical system is great in a lot of ways, but also could be limiting with there’s so many more types of practitioners out there and medical practices that could be really helpful to people. So just connecting with your community members to learn what’s in your head. area, or even meeting up with the community members building relationships with people who are maybe going through a similar situation. Yeah, like you said, sharing equipment, there’s a lot of a lot of options for when you can find members that live near you and chat them up and connect.

Beautiful. Yeah, so I’m really excited for all this, I’m so excited to how we came together to build this app even better. And you know, and then this is fetal brain school, class one, just want to reorient you or orient you on Empower Network. This is where fetal brain school is going to be happening. And wanted to give you some tools to prepare for fetal brain School, which is going to be on Tuesday. So a week from today, same bat time, same bat channel, what we can do to prepare is if you don’t have them, go to the fetal brain tab, it’s under what functional nutrition on unpowered neuro go to the functional nutrition tab. And then it says fetal brain. And there are the handouts in there. And each one of those handouts you can download, or you can purchase the essential guides, laminated from my website as well. And which have been super useful, which is why I created them, because you can like get them wet and get them dirty and have them in the kitchen. And then you can put them in the dishwasher. And those are awesome. I have copies of those in my kitchen. And yeah, right do you do? So yeah, I want you guys to get those handouts, and have those handy because we’re gonna go through each of those and really talk about feeding the brain, why it’s so important to feed your brain. And what we can do to give our brains the best shot to recover nutritionally, nutritionally, is not everything. But it’s, it’s the supplies, you know, it’s the supplies that we rebuild these neuronal connections with. And it’s so imperative that we have that dialed in, so that everything else goes smoothly. One last question want to ask you, Jackie, and, you know, when I was in hospital, people talked about occupational therapy, being the hands and physical therapy being the lower extremities, and that was basically the bottom line with PT and OT. And I don’t think you define it the same way.

Oh, my gosh, now, it’s like soul crushing when I hear that for both PT and OT, because it’s just, and I understand, I guess, why? How that has developed, because in the hospital systems, when you’re in that stage of recovery, physical therapists are really, really focused on getting you mobile, right, they’re trying to get you to be transferring and standing and walking. And yes, a lot of that does have to do with your legs, but they’re looking at your whole body, right. And if you have a shoulder issue, they’re addressing that too. And with occupational therapy, I’m gonna kind of break that down a little bit. So people can understand occupational, it doesn’t mean work related. It actually just the word broken down is things that occupy your time, that’s where the occupational comes from. So we are rehabilitating people to do a specific activity that they occupy their time with. So in the hospital, right, it might be a lot of eating and dressing and bathing, which thinking about that, right, of course, it’s involving a lot of your hands with what you do. But people also get dressed standing up. So we focus on the legs in that day. It also relates to any other thing that occupies your time, which is a broad scope, it could be of course, like cooking, cleaning laundry, it could be returning to work, it could be walking your dog, it could be really anything that occupies your time. So we both physical therapy and occupational therapy are treating like the entire person. But physical therapy is focusing a little bit more on the structural components, right of your muscles moving like things like that, that’s very small for what they do. But and then occupational therapy is more focused on the activity that you’re trying to get back to doing. And we break that activity down into the cognitive components, emotional components, physical components, and rehab. Each of those together was, you know, I could get on myself.

I think that’s really important and why it’s so important, because understanding that Jackie’s expertise and our ability to help in these situations goes pretty deep. And it’s all about you wrote on your website, did you have a deep passion for helping people create a more pleasurable life, which is why you fell in love with occupational therapy. I love it’s like when I read your page, I was just like, Yeah, this girl’s cool. And then when I got to realize that I love Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I was like, oh, man, we had a lot to talk about. So thank you so much. Thank you, Jackie. Thank you. It’s It’s really awesome to be partnering with you on this. For those who are listening on the podcast. Thank you for being here. And thank you, Jackie.

Thank you. I’m so glad we’re teaming up. You’re very lucky that we got connected. Thankful for it. Likewise. All right, thanks, guys. Here we go and powered neuro community. And I want you all to become part of this community. It’s got free classes, there are paid classes free community where you can connect with other community members. And we have a free version and a paid version. Free version, of course, is free. And it’s a community that we wanted to create. For you, this is your community. And then the paid version is under $20 a month, or under 200 a year if you want to pay for it all up front. And the paid version gives you access to the live interviews, and q&a afterward on those interviews and events, which also includes the adventures and brain injury podcast, you get to be there live and ask questions on the brain, the adventures or brain injury podcast, which is pretty cool. There is a lot of content that Jackie has already built out, and that I’m in the process of building out for the paid community. It’s going to have classes, I mean, she has all sorts of trainings to be a therapeutic caregiver, meaning a caregiver who helps their loved one therapeutically, which so many of you already are, but it takes to the next level and you have the expertise of an occupational therapist, and a really good occupational therapist who, whose heart is totally in the right place. So yeah, welcome. And I’m so happy to be bringing the adventures and brain injury podcast back. And I’m so happy to be reconnecting with all of you. So we’ll see you next week, Tuesday 6pm. Go join empowered neuro right now that’s empowered neuro.com You can join the free community, or the paid community, both of them will have access to fetal brain school. And this is just a mini course going through some things and we’ll build out some more in depth stuff in the paid version. But there’s plenty plenty to teach, and I’m so excited to be doing that here. Again. We’ll see you next week. Tuesday. 6pmjacki