Creating New Neural Pathways for Success with CognoMovement Expert Katie Wrigley

Join us as industry leading cognitive movement practitioner and coach Katie Wrigley shares her personal journey of overcoming physical and emotional pain through cognitive movement.

Katie knows what its like to endure a life-altering event, or several life altering events. She also knows how to alchemize that into a super power to help you take your life back.

After trying to deny and run from a childhood trauma for 40 years that created destructive patterns of addiction, overworking, high levels of anxiety and stress, Katie found herself disabled, at rock bottom, and her life and health were a mess.

After employing 2 coaches to help her get her life and health back on track, Katie was able to start to enjoy life again through mindset work and psychedelic ceremony, but still had debilitating nerve pain down her left leg and was facing neurosurgery.

As we often see with the Universe though, someone came back into Katie’s life out of the blue, and introduced her to Cognomovement.

Thanks to the power of this modality, Katie was able to cancel her neurosurgery consult and heal her body and mind to a degree that she was able to leave her Corporate career behind just months after being certified as a Cognomovement Practitioner, and enabled her to complete her first half marathon in June of 2024.
 
She explains that physical pain is often connected to unresolved emotions and trauma.

Through cognitive movement, which involves eye and body movements, the body's neurology can be regulated and new neural pathways can be created.

Katie emphasizes the importance of feeling and acknowledging emotions in order to heal. She also highlights the role of subconscious patterns and the activation of learning centers in the brain.

Katie's work has helped successful coaches, entrepreneurs, professionals, first responders, and veterans find relief from pain, fear, overwhelm to improve their lives.

Learn the power of using Cognomovement Therapy to create new neural pathways that enhance cognitive flexibility, emotional resilience, and overall well-being. As a result, participants experience greater freedom in their thoughts and actions, empowering them to achieve success in various aspects of their lives.

Takeaways:

• Physical pain is often connected to unresolved emotions and trauma.
• Cognitive movement involves eye and body movements to regulate the body's neurology and create new neural pathways.
• Feeling and acknowledging emotions is important for healing.
• Subconscious patterns and the activation of learning centers in the brain play a role in cognitive movement.
• Cognitive movement can help professionals, first responders, and veterans find relief from pain and improve their lives.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction and Background
03:08 From Corporate America to Cognitive Movement
08:04 The Turning Point and Healing Journey
10:56 Understanding Cognitive Movement
13:35 The Science Behind Cognitive Movement
18:11 Working with Professionals and Transforming Lives
20:44 Connecting with Katie Wrigley

To learn more about Cognitive Movement and how Katie can support you, join her at: www.KatieWrigley.com 

To Learn more about growing a Thriving Lifestyle Coaching Business, grab your FREE Masterclass Training Today! www.LifestyleBusinessQuest.com

Transcript

Well, all right, welcome back to the Lifestyle Business Quest podcast. I'm Travis Greenlee, your host. And as always, it is an honor to have you with us. And today I've got a really, really powerful episode in store for you. Today I've got my friend and partner, Katie Wrigley. We've been together now for about six months or so in terms of serving and supporting and helping others to live better lives. Let me tell you a little bit about Katie's background.

She is a coach, she's a consultant, she's an industry leading cognitive movement practitioner helping professionals to get unstuck, to become pain free and to live the lives that they truly love. So Katie, it's an honor, darling. How are you? How's it going over

Thank you, Travis. It's an honor to be here. It's going great having a fantastic day. How are you doing?

I'm doing great, doing really, really well. So I'm so excited to get into your story. Of course, I know your story. I know your background and it is crazy. Like you have been through some crazy, crazy ass stuff. Let's start there. Let's kind tell a little bit about your backstory in terms of where you've been from your corporate America, through all the pain and the experience there, and then to finding what you do now in terms of how you help and how you serve your clients. So paint us a little picture if you would.

it's been a wild ride as you said. So I was actually in corporate for a little over 24 years total and I left just over three years ago to work full time on my business now and Cognitive Movement is actually one of the ways I was able to get there. More on that in a moment.

So what I didn't know, because I was very goal oriented even as a kid and going to college was the only way that my family did things. So there was never any other option for me. So I got my business degree, into IT and then into cyber security and I thought I loved it and I did love a lot about it because that was the first place I started to get confident. But in my early 30s, I had hit all of my career goals and I was miserable.

and I didn't understand why because I was still stuck in that pattern where I was looking outside of myself for the right car, the right house, the right partner, the right friends, the right everything and I wasn't looking internal.

for anything at all. And I remember having a conversation with one of my friends and like just being tormented because I didn't understand like why do I feel so crappy? I have all this stuff going for me, but I felt like I had nothing. And so I answered that with higher levels of denial, more work and plunged into addictions, started to take on a global role. So I got to travel all over the world. I was traveling 70 to 90 percent of the time, which is a fabulous way to avoid everything that you want to avoid.

I continued that path to about 2016, 2017 things started to really hurt. And in 2018, I couldn't ignore it anymore. And I was disabled after a knee replacement, unable to heal and I didn't understand how I had gotten there.

But it had me taking a hard look because I was in my early 40s at the time. And it's like, all right, if this is what my life is going to be and there was no one telling me that it was going to be any different, this is going to be a hell of a long road. And I don't know if I'm going to make it into my 70s because I can't handle this level of pain for the next 30 years.

Wow. Crazy, crazy, crazy. And certainly something that I think we can all relate to. Again, your professional background, IT, high pressure. I mean, I just think about how many people listening now can relate to this. Maybe they're in the very similar situation. So it affected you from a physical perspective, not only mentally, not only emotionally, but especially physically. So what was that like for you in terms of like debilitating and how that affected you and your overall

It was pure hell. And so I want to make a note on physical pain. I am yet to find any case of physical pain that is 100 % physical that doesn't have any emotion attached to it. Even if it is a sudden and acute injury, you're going to have some feelings around that. So in my case, I had all of these unfelt emotions that had been gathering since I had been a little kid because unbeknownst to me until 2019, I hadn't fully acknowledged a

trauma that had happened that had really been the root driver of all of this self -destructive activity, the reaching for things outside of myself, the wanting to avoid the inside, all of that came down from those earlier years. And so what it looked like is I had no boundaries. I had let people take hundreds of thousands of dollars from me. Physically my neck hurt. I couldn't type for more than 20 minutes without my fingers going numb. When I got my puppy, the little, well of course she's no longer on camera, my beloved

Yeah.

She was eight weeks old. My mailbox was maybe a tenth of a mile away round trip and between her tiny little legs and my pain levels we needed a nap after we went to the mailbox and it was it was awful. It took me about an hour or so to get out of bed in the morning because I hurt so bad. just

Wow.

It sucked. in that time frame, I had a couple of friends that had committed suicide. And what really scared me was that I started to envy them because they had had the balls to do what I was too afraid to do. Thank God I was too afraid to do it because I suicide is the farthest thing on my mind now. But end of 2018 going into 2019, that was yeah, it was it was awful.

Again, wow. Again, and something I think that so many people can relate to. And I love the fact that you talk about, number one, just being so open and honest and transparent and vulnerable. Like tell it like it is, just being raw. Because I think so many people, especially professionals, on the surface, we've got it all together. We've got the friends, we've got the house, we've got the cars, we've got the tribe, we've got all those things, but on the inside, not the same story.

You've got a lot of other things going on. So it showed up for you from a physical, like a physical manifestation. And thank God you were able to see that and be able to turn that around. tell us about that. What was the turning point? How did you begin to pivot? How did you begin to move away from the dark night of the soul, from hitting that rock bottom and then beginning to move

Yeah, so my life was such a mess that I actually needed two coaches, not just one. So I had one that I just signed on with for years, a life coach. had done a couple of shorter engagements with her and gotten a lot out of it. And in fact, I'm still in her accountability group to this day because with any kind of growth work, as you know, Travis, it's important that we still have some measure of accountability. And so she's still a friend of mine and I'm still part of her accountability group. And then I also started to work with someone she had recommended to me who was focused

on pain and health. And this woman planted a very important seed that I thought was total BS at first. But that seed was that I had everything inside of me already to heal. I just needed to learn how to access it and be able to shed some of these emotions. I was so angry. I was pissed off all the time for like 40 years. I was angry at everything and everyone and I would go off at the drop of a hat. And starting to go through those emotions and she was smart. She got my attention really quickly. So when

I was introduced to her I had been limping for a year and a half like first before the knee replacement then after my legs still hadn't fully extended after that knee replacement yet. If anybody here has had one you know how grueling it is it's one of the hardest surgeries mentally and physically that you can come back from and I failed it I did not do well I'll just say that I'm not example what to do with a knee replacement I'm an example what not to do but

Within two to three weeks I stopped limping and it's funny because our brains don't notice the absence of things as quickly as it notices the presence. So I'm not sure exactly the day I stopped limping. I just realized one day as I was walking around my house that I wasn't limping anymore. I'm like, all right, she's got me. Attention.

Whoa, right. It's working. I mean, from a physical perspective, not only just emotionally and mentally, but like physically you're, you're stopped limping. So that's huge. And like you said, it got your attention. So coming from the skeptical place, the cynical place, like I think so many of us are these days, right? We just don't trust processes, especially something like this that could potentially be so miraculous. You started to really begin to manifest this. You, you stop limping. And so that got your attention.

Yeah.

Where'd you go from

I started listening to everything she had to say. So at the time I was still taking meds for anxiety. the anxiety had gotten so bad in the year or so before I was disabled that I had actually thrown up from anxiety and had to go to the ER a couple times because I couldn't get the panic under control. I had about 20 years of controlling panic attacks under my belt at that point. But it was just unraveling so fast. And so it started with meditation and practicing forgiveness. Because like I said I was really pissed off.

So she started there and then she had me expanding more into more meditations, doing different work with eye movements, which now I understand a lot more of that's a big part of cognitive movement. And another piece that she taught me was how to use psychedelic medicine with intention as a ceremonial healing tool, not as a way to trip balls with your friends, which is a very different use. And so I started to do a couple of psychedelic ceremonies. And one of the first things

is when I was under the influence of the medicine, I didn't feel any pain at all.

And I was getting all these visions, all these pieces of information that were helping me heal. And so I'm like, all right, I'm in, I'm in. And it kept going, but I still had unresolved nerve pain by the time 2020 came around. And so I started to look for something else and hadn't found it. And then by the grace of God, a friend of mine came in out of the blue. I'd actually met him at my first ayahuasca ceremony. And he was like, hey, you should try this

called Cognitive Movement. I think you may get something out of it. And the rest has been history. I actually did a half marathon last month.

What? my gosh. From literally not being able to walk, to be able to get back and forth from the mailbox without a nap, to being able to run a half marathon. Absolutely fantastic. Again, this is huge in terms of what is possible. Tell us about the Cognitive Movement. I know that you're a practitioner, you're a leader within the space. You've shared a little bit about it with me as well as some of our clients and the people we work with and it's absolutely fascinating.

I mean, it is just incredible in terms of the science behind it and the theory behind it and how this whole thing works. So what is it? Because certainly when you first shared it with me, I'm like, what the heck is this stuff? I'd never heard of it before. I think a lot of people are in the same boat. So what is it? In a nutshell, what is it? How does it work? How does it produce the benefits that you're doing? And then what are you seeing with your clients? Like, how is it really transforming lives overall?

Yeah.

So the premise behind a cognitive movement is that our bodies are expressing for us the emotion that our mind cannot. And so all of it operates on that presence. So for those of you who watching, not listening, it utilizes this brightly colored ball, which is meant to activate both hemispheres of the brain. And so it activates and harmonizes the brain. And through various different eye and body movements, we're actually tapping directly into the body's neurology, helping to down -regulate, create new neural pathways. We also activate all three learning centers

auditory visual kinesthetic, which allows any changes in the session to be more permanent and more immediate because of the activation of those centers. So it's as simple as focusing on a physical sensation. And most of us don't realize there's a physical sensation with everything that's bothering us. If we didn't feel it in the body, we wouldn't care. It's just a matter of learning how to tap into that. So the client focuses on that physical sensation, whether it's physical pain or an emotion, or it may be even something that they feel like

stuck with. They focus on that and by focusing on it we start to unravel that pattern. Another piece is we all have these subconscious patterns that are running. So only 10 % of the brain is conscious. Cognitive movement is actually able to help find some of these autopilot things that are going on that work against us and help shift them into patterns that then work for us. So that's a quick nutshell on cognitive movement.

Dang girl, that sounds absolutely amazing. And again, the science behind that. Again, you were sharing me with some of the science because it sounds incredible. It sounds almost too good to be true. It sounds so simple like, haven't we been doing this or why haven't we been utilizing this modality forever and ever and ever? Again, seeing the results that you've gotten as well. So tell us a little bit about, if you would, the science behind it, like really how this thing works, the emotions

you know, forging new neural pathways and those types of things to be able to not only get people out of pain, but to be able to create better lives for themselves, to release anger. Like you said, you're angry for 40 years. You'd go off with anybody at the tip of that. And I think there's a lot of people that can relate to that. Again, I mean, it's a crazy world. We've got a lot of things going on right now. A lot of stress, a lot of challenges, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear.

Thank

So to be able to come through all of that, be able to get to the other side of it, my God, I it's just got to be miraculous. So tell us a little bit, if you would, about some of the science behind some of this stuff and how it actually works specifically.

So we do a lot with the eyes themselves and the cross body movements as well. So when we do the cross body movements, we're actually moving information across the corpus callosum. So when we've experienced a negative event or let's just call it a trauma and we could actually go into the very recent past, the assassination attempt on Trump last weekend. So what happens in those events and everybody who was there experiences this certain event, but I'm going to use my fist as an example here to kind of show you what's happening.

and how cognitive movement helps to get the body back into harmony again. So if we have my fist here with a thumb kind of inside the fingers, and the thumb represents the amygdala, which sits behind your eyes. It's a part of the brain that's scanning for danger all the time. It's attached to your limbic system, which is your fight or flight, the primitive brain. It was the first part of your brain that was developed.

This, the fingers represent the corpus callosum. This doesn't get fully developed until we're in our 20s. This is why we see some really crazy, irrational stuff in teens and in younger kids. It's not developed yet. It doesn't actually even start to grow until we're about eight, six or seven.

But when we experience a dramatic event or traumatic event, we literally blow our lids or flip our lids. And we've heard this expression, blow our top, flip our lids. We've literally, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. So this means your amygdala, that tiny little thing, now has nothing in front of it, no reason, no rational thought to tell it that something isn't actually a danger. And so everything gets perceived through a higher fear lens for a while, through a higher level of anxiety. We need to put the lid

on again. And so that's what we're doing. And by acknowledging the feelings in there, this can feel counterintuitive, because people who have dealt with anxiety most of their lives, they're trying to avoid it like a cat over a bathtub, anything but feel that by feeling it, you're going to break it apart much faster. And so by utilizing a lot of the eye movements that we do in here in cognitive movement, we're actually getting all the eye muscles to relax when those eye muscles relax, accuse the fascia, which is actually

throughout our entire body and that's where trauma is stored. It just goes to different places in the fascia depending on the person's physiology, their history and what the nature of the trauma was. But it clues to the fascia and to the muscles in the jaw and in the neck and in the shoulders, all of that that we can relax. And so all of this just starts to calm down, feel lighter. A lot of times one of the things I'll hear after a session is like my shoulders feel lighter.

Like that's to be expected, that's good. That means that we actually got a lot of your stress to unwind and relax. And we just continue to go through that. And so in every session, I wanna try to get people as close to a zero, meaning they aren't feeling anything at all anymore, as I possibly can, depending on the length of the trauma, the severity.

If it's something like grief, like someone who's lost a child, I've actually helped work with a father who had lost a child. We're not going to do that in one session. That's going to be a lot more than that. It's still a complex issue in there. But by addressing the different pieces that come up, because it's not just grief, there's shame, there's guilt, there's anger. By addressing each one of those pieces in there, the body is going to be able to go back into that situation. And we have techniques where we walk you through the facts of a situation without

Any of the emotion that's in there and it gives the body and the brain the ability to reorganize that without all the emotions and we know that the trauma has been removed or at least neutralized when it feels more like something they've seen on TV Versus they've gone through themselves and that's a question that I usually ask is like does it still feel like it happened to you and There's certain eye movements I'm looking for because sometimes people they just want to make me happy right and like yeah, yeah that worked

their eyes are going to move in certain ways I'm not going to tell you that tell me that we actually got it I can find them actually looking for it and it's like okay yep I know I got it

Fascinating. This is so incredibly fascinating and so rewarding. From your perspective to not only go through the dark night of the soul, to experience the physical pain and the emotional pain and the fear and everything that you went through and then to be able to experience this firsthand and to learn from this and now be able to take this and to be able to serve others. Talk about a passion project that you can get behind.

Who are your ideal clients? Who are the people that you really love serving, the people that you feel you can really do your best work with, and of course, those that are really getting the best results from your time together?

love working with professionals who are just tired with the level of challenge that they have been dealing with. They feel like they're stuck, they're at their breaking point, they are ready for change, and it's the point, you know that you're at this point.

when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same. That's when you know you're ready. And those are the people I like working with the most, especially including first responders and veterans. I've been able to help a business owner who had been in a severe car accident and had been in pain for nine years. She got her entire life back. She spends all her time with her family now and she's becoming a little mini real estate mogul. Like she had had a couple of rental properties before, but now she's like learning all this stuff

like low -income housing, high -income housing, and she's like gobbling up properties all over Maine and she loves it and she's dedicated to her family and she gets to spend all this time with them. I see posts all the time where kids have big grins on their faces. She has a big grin on her face. I love it. I helped turn off an actual tremor in a veteran. He came in with a little bit of a tremor. I'm like, you want to get rid of that? He's like, yeah.

I got rid of it. I've been able to help multiple polyphosphoracers be able to sleep. That's the number one complaint that they come in with. And what's great about Cognitive

They don't have to tell me what's wrong. It's not like talk therapy where you have to come in and crack your heart open and be wide open and exposed. You can be as private or as open as you are comfortable being when you come in to work with me. It doesn't matter. You don't have to tell me anything that you don't want to tell me. And so that's been hugely popular, especially with the officers I work with because they are great at shoving down all the things that are distressing and disturbing in their

so they aren't even really aware sometimes of what's bothering them and that's the beauty of the eye movements is aware or not the eyes are going to find it and we look for those neurological clues we smooth them out and we know that when we see it smoothed out we've resolved it in the neurology.

Love it. Love it, love it, love it. And I love you for doing this and for sharing this and for making the difference that you are in this world. where can people find you? They want to find you, reach you, connect with you, have a conversation with you about what might be possible for them. What's the best way for them to be able to do

go directly to my website katyriggly .com. It is right in the middle of getting shifted right now, but either way there will be an option, regardless of whether you're getting my old set or my new, to book a free 30 minute call with me. So I wanna get to know anybody that is curious about working with me. I wanna have a call with you first and get to know you a little bit better and be able to speak to how I may be able to help you. Or if I don't feel like I'm the best fit for you, I will guide you to someone I think may be a better fit.

Awesome. Wonderful, wonderful. Katie, thank you so much, Jarlene. Really appreciate you again, your time. I know how busy you are out there serving and supporting the world the way that you do. So thanks for being here. It's been a huge contribution for all of us here in our lifestyle business tribe and our family and our audience. And so thank you for everything that you shared with us today.

Thank you, Travis. Thank you for having me on. It's awesome to be here.

Awesome. Have a great day, darling.

You too.