[00:00:00] Dr. Katie Deming: Could chronic pain, brain fog, or even mood swings be a sign you're dehydrated?[00:00:05] Dr. Katie Deming: Today we're talking to Isabel Friend, a renowned water educator who goes far beyond the standard 8 glasses a day advice. Isabel has spent 13 years studying water from scientific, spiritual, biological, and even eco political perspectives. She reveals the hidden science behind water's impact on your health, and how even mild dehydration can trigger a cascade of symptoms [00:00:30] you might not expect.

[00:00:31] Dr. Katie Deming: Isabel gives you five practical, actionable strategies to optimize your hydration. You'll learn about different types of water and their varying effects, discover simple yet effective techniques to truly quench your thirst, and gain valuable insights to unlock the true potential of water for a healthier, more radiant you.

[00:00:51] Dr. Katie Deming: Stick around until the end and you'll hear her opinion about the popular yet controversial Kangan water system. So [00:01:00] let's dive in.

[00:01:00] Dr. Katie Deming: You're listening to the Born to Heal podcast, and I'm your host, Dr. Katie Deming. After two decades of practicing as an oncologist and caring for thousands of patients, I've seen firsthand how our healthcare system places obstacles in your path to true healing. My guests and I will bridge the worlds of Western medicine and alternative healing to help you achieve optimal health.

[00:01:25] Dr. Katie Deming: Expect to uncover new insights, share a few laughs, and maybe [00:01:30] even shed some tears. But most of all, we'll learn how to heal from within, together. So let's dive into today's episode.

[00:01:39] Dr. Katie Deming: Dr. Zach Bush says that 100 percent of us are dehydrated. As someone who's spent 13 years studying water and working with some of the most brilliant water scientists in the world, what's your take on this idea that we're all

[00:01:53] Isabel Friend: dehydrated?

[00:01:55] Isabel Friend: / I think it is absolutely true because We have a very [00:02:00] backwards understanding of what hydration is.

[00:02:03] Isabel Friend: And if we don't recognize what hydration is, how can we effectively hydrate ourselves? If we think that hydrating is a matter of how much water we drink, then we're just going to keep drinking schwag water and it's just going to keep passing straight through us. And that's actually a process of irrigation.

[00:02:16] Isabel Friend: We irrigate all day, every day. But how much we hydrate is actually dependent on a lot of different factors. That can be boiled down to the quality of the water that we drink, how bioavailable is it, but even [00:02:30] more importantly than that, and the thing that's most overlooked, is the lifestyle factors of are our cells able to absorb and retain and put to use all of that water, right?

[00:02:42] Isabel Friend: So that's actually hydration, that's how much we absorb. And unfortunately, our capacity to really absorb and retain water is greatly diminished every single day by our lifestyles. So we are basically living in a desert without even realizing it because Just about everything [00:03:00] about the modern Western lifestyle is physiologically dehydrating us, drying us out, destructuring our biowater, deuterating our biowater, demineralizing our biowater.

[00:03:11] Isabel Friend: So rather than thinking of hydration as being Have you had eight glasses of water yet today? It's much more helpful to think about hydration in terms of how is my intracellular fluid, right? How is my biowater? Does my biowater have everything that it needs in terms of [00:03:30] its mineral ratios, its isotopic composition, its structural profile?

[00:03:34] Isabel Friend: And when we're looking at hydration in those terms, pretty much everyone is dehydrated. Got it. And I

[00:03:40] Dr. Katie Deming: think that this is, you know, this is one of the things that I've been talking to people about is it's how we hold, it's the water that we hold, like you're talking about, the water that we're holding in our body.

[00:03:52] Dr. Katie Deming: And I want to say cells, but I know Tom Cowen would be like, I don't even know cells exist, but basically the water. We're not going to go there today, but [00:04:00] just the water, yes, that is another episode for sure. But so the water that we hold in our body, can you talk about this in terms of, let's first start by talking about what are those things that are influencing the way that we hold the water in our cells that you said that are degrading, this, the, I don't know, how did you describe it?

[00:04:21] Dr. Katie Deming: The health of our water? Or.

[00:04:23] Isabel Friend: I think it's not just the water that we hold, it's fundamentally it's the water that we are. It's not just that [00:04:30] our bodies use water. Our bodies are water. We often hear that we're 70 percent water, and that's roughly true volumetrically speaking, by volume We're anywhere from, you know, 50 to 80 percent water, depending on our age and our level of health and that sort of thing.

[00:04:47] Isabel Friend: You know, when you're a baby, you're almost entirely water by the time we're an elderly person, we're only about 50 percent water. So that, that volumetric number shifts over the course of our lifetime. But molecularly speaking, if you were to count all of the molecules in your body, you [00:05:00] are 99. 9%. 99. 89 to 99.

[00:05:04] Isabel Friend: 95 percent water molecules. So for every 1000 molecules in your body, 999. 5 of them are water. So it's, it's really helpful when we're starting to shift our paradigm of understanding water as the medium of life, to recognize that we are bodies of water and that when we, prioritize the central role of [00:05:30] water, Then absolutely every other aspect of health starts coming into, a better,focal lens.

[00:05:38] Isabel Friend: It just helps us to see every single, health issue that we have through a better perspective. Because what we're starting to realize, research is pointing again and again to the fact that dehydration underlies every single chronic disease,that has been studied. And so, one of the reasons why we don't realize that we're so dehydrated is because the body, as Dr.

[00:05:59] Isabel Friend: [00:06:00] Batnagelidj says, is a system of sophisticated thirst signals. And that everything ranging from chronic pain to, mood swings to brain fog to headaches to, you name it. Is some way of the body adapting to chronic water shortage or an improper balance of the profile of the internal waters, right? And so we tend to think of thirst as only being, Oh, well, I have dry mouth right now, so let me drink some [00:06:30] water.

[00:06:30] Isabel Friend: But actually, according to Batmanghelidj and others, pretty much every, discomfort, disease, disharmony or imbalance in the body. Is some type of thirst signal. Even localized pain is chronic drought in that area of the body. It's localized dehydration when you have chronic pain in a certain area.

[00:06:52] Isabel Friend: And so when we're looking at how to properly hydrate ourselves, there are so many factors that go into it. [00:07:00] And it's really important to lay kind of a baseline of understanding that everything that we do on a daily basis because we are bodies of water and water is the most sensitive substance in the universe.

[00:07:11] Isabel Friend: In fact, it's been called the sensitive chaos, right? Because it's, it's basically Nature's sensory organ. She is acutely attuned to a subtle vibratory shifts along a scale of 60 octaves. We can't even conceptualize, [00:07:30] really, of how broad the 60 octaves is. And so she's constantly responding to everything in the environment.

[00:07:35] Isabel Friend: Electromagnetic frequencies, light, sound, radio waves,Our vibrations, our, our emotions, our thoughts. In fact, it's said that this is actually why, you know, the biology of belief, Dr. Bruce Lipton's work is accurate. This is why this is the modus operandi. This is the locus of the biology of belief is the fact that our bio water is so acutely sensitive to [00:08:00] everything.

[00:08:00] Isabel Friend: So everything that we encounter on a daily basis. And this is either hydrating us and making us more juicy and structuring our intracellular fluid and helping our bio waters to flow and to transition better between the different hydrological cycles and watersheds of the body, or it's creating more stagnation.

[00:08:18] Isabel Friend: It's creating more destructurization. It's creating more,dehydration and its various forms. So some common, easily the most common dehydrating factors that we do [00:08:30] constantly on a daily basis is. EMF exposure. So being in the presence of strong man made non native electromagnetic fields can cause your cell membranes to start to resonate at a different frequency.

[00:08:42] Isabel Friend: Now we could get into whether or not cell membranes are what we think they are, but based on the current medical paradigm, what we've seen is that hydration that the osmotic flow of hydrating water into a cell and the detoxifying flow of used water out of a cell. That's an [00:09:00] electrical process. And so it's actually the voltage at the cell membrane that determines the osmotic flow of water in and out of the cell.

[00:09:08] Isabel Friend: And our bodies are basically tuning forks, so they will start to, over time, resonate with whatever the dominant frequency in our field is. And so if we're in the presence of strong made non native electromagnetic fields, then we can literally start to resonate out of tune. Out of sync with with the ideal electromagnetic [00:09:30] vibrations at at the cell membrane, which inhibits that osmotic flow of water.

[00:09:33] Isabel Friend: our gap junctions as well can start to resonate at the at a different frequency. And because that is an electromagnetic process, it means that we Physiologically cannot absorb as much hydration when we're in the presence of those signals. So having a really well rounded and balanced approach to electromagnetic fields is going to be one of the foremost strategies for proper intracellular hydration.

[00:09:58] Isabel Friend: another would be movement. [00:10:00] So, whereas our heart beautifully vortexes all of our blood through our body without our having to do much of anything at all and thank heavens for that. Most of the other watersheds in our body are Thank you. Hydraulic networks and hydraulic means movement by water. So they need us to move in order for them to move that your bio waters move when you move.

[00:10:21] Isabel Friend: And when you're sitting stagnant, you can't absorb hydration as well because your fascia, for example. is an irrigative [00:10:30] network that is 80 percent protein, or sorry, 80 percent structured water and 20 percent protein. And your fascia is this, this beautiful gel like webbing that will deliver droplets of water to each and every single one of your cells.

[00:10:44] Isabel Friend: And it's through the compression and the release of the fascia as we move that actually delivers that hydration where it needs to go. So if we're sitting still and we're sitting stagnant, this is actually the reason why they say sitting is the new smoking. And it's actually more dangerous than smoking a pack [00:11:00] a day in the long term in terms of all cause mortality.

[00:11:03] Isabel Friend: Being stagnant raises your risk of all cause mortality by, I forget the figures, but they're staggering. And it's because Your bio water is not able to flow when you're sitting still so different areas of your body or different areas of your fascia will start to dry up, and you'll start to experience more acidification more inflammation in those areas, and then, and you're, you're.

[00:11:26] Isabel Friend: Fascia won't be able to deliver water to the cells in those [00:11:30] areas as well. So that's where we start getting chronic pain. The body just starts to try to, do the best it can with the limited resources that it has, right? It starts to delegate its limited water supplies away from the less essential areas and towards the essential areas that keep you alive.

[00:11:46] Isabel Friend: And then those less essential areas that don't have their proper irrigative flow, they stop functioning as well. And then we just have a whole host of different labels and diagnoses that we put onto that. Of course, your lymphatic system as [00:12:00] well, it only moves when you move and you have three times more lymph in your body than blood.

[00:12:05] Isabel Friend: And so this is one of the biggest watersheds and one of the most important watersheds in the body because it's hydration is not only a matter of how much we're absorbing. It's also a matter of How well our bio water is transitioning between its different phases and functions within the hydrology of our body.

[00:12:21] Isabel Friend: And so if you're getting a lot of lymphatic fluid that's just not able to move, then all of the toxins that it is meant to be washing away like [00:12:30] an internal shower, it just kind of stagnates there and you're kind of sitting and stewing in your own sewage to an extent. And, you know, I've heard of some cases where the lymphatic fluid will be so stagnant in an area that it almost starts.

[00:12:43] Isabel Friend: to calcify and becomes almost as hard as bone. And so we really want to be careful to make sure that all of our bio waters are actually flowing and moving and irrigating and detoxifying in the way that they need to. And. The biggest [00:13:00] factor in that is our daily movement. Now, thankfully, when we're talking about movement for hydration, it's not the same as talking about movement for muscle building or cardiovascular health.

[00:13:11] Isabel Friend: It's not like we need to go hit the gym and lift weights and do a bunch of cardio. Thankfully, really small movements to us are still really big movements to ourselves. And so it's a matter of, you know, even if you do have a stagnant desk job where you need to be sitting all day, even just taking like slight movements, just making sure that every one of [00:13:30] your joints is getting at least a little bit of motion.

[00:13:32] Isabel Friend: Like you could make it a game, try to find, okay, you know, has my, has my third left toe moved diagonally yet today? It's about as many small novel movements as possible and making sure that you just have the full dynamic range so that there's just a little bit of lubrication happening everywhere at least once a day.

[00:13:51] Isabel Friend: I love that.

[00:13:52] Dr. Katie Deming: And I love how you're tying so many pieces together, which is just beautiful. And I love the movement [00:14:00] piece of tying that to the water. And I loved hearing about the fascia and then the lymphatics. And it makes so much sense. And it is different. Like, you know, lymphatic massage is like very gentle.

[00:14:15] Dr. Katie Deming: I remember when sending patients for lymphatic massage after breast cancer treatment, and they were like, what is that? That's not even like a massage, but it's like just these very gentle, you know, stroking can help with the movement of the lymphatic system. And so it makes sense. [00:14:30] That just gentle movements, keep our waters moving in this way.

[00:14:33] Dr. Katie Deming: And obviously our lymphatics need to move things. This is the filtration system of our body is removing toxins.

[00:14:41] Isabel Friend: So that's absolutely. And I think that that lymphatic massage serves a lot of different purposes when it comes to hydration, not just for moving the lymph, but because it is such a gentle and nurturing.

[00:14:53] Isabel Friend: experience. It can actually be amazing for the vagus nerve as well. It can help us to just get back into [00:15:00] our parasympathetic dominance. And as soon as we have that state of rest in the body, then we're no longer sending the stress signals through our physiology that tell our bio water to destructure.

[00:15:12] Isabel Friend: And it's easier for our bio water to actually stay. Crystalline and well structured when we're in a state of relaxation and ease. So as much self care, as much nurturing and nourishment as we can possibly give to ourselves, you know, the state of our nervous system is another huge factor in our state of [00:15:30] hydration as well.

[00:15:31] Isabel Friend: Absolutely.

[00:15:31] Dr. Katie Deming: And also there's the laying of hands with the infrared in, you know, that kind of massage as well, affecting the water. So I think that. You have such a vast experience. I loved actually reading on your profile of your mission. Your mission is to create a comprehensive water Academy spans of practical insights of health, hydration and biology to empower tactics for watershed guardianship and ecological activism to the esoteric and [00:16:00] subtle insights of ancient indigenous water wisdom to the heady scientific discoveries of cutting edge water research.

[00:16:08] Dr. Katie Deming: I just think that. You're, you span, you, you have such a fascinating background because you've for 13 years have just dove into water headfirst and, and submerge yourself and also surrounded yourself with some of the, you know, world's leading water experts, but I want to, let's [00:16:30] step back for like just a minute.

[00:16:31] Dr. Katie Deming: And tell me how, how did you come upon this work and like, what was your gateway into here that really opened your eyes to, to realize there's something really significant about water?

[00:16:45] Isabel Friend: And my journey with water started back in 2009 was living in Brooklyn and I was a nutritionist at the time. And specifically I was studying nutrigenomics, which is how the food that we eat actually affects our gene expression.

[00:16:59] Isabel Friend: And I was [00:17:00] finding, through my research that, wow, actually when we eat wild, non domesticated, non hybridized, foraged foods, It actually helps us to have more wild, non domesticated gene expressions similar to our ancient progenitors. But that when we eat a lot of hybridized and domesticated crops, we actually get a degraded gene expression that makes us just more docile, passive, disease prone [00:17:30] human beings.

[00:17:30] Isabel Friend: we don't have that, that wild,um, resiliency, in a way. And so I was starting to wildcraft and forage all of my food, and not all of it at that point, but more and more of it, and over time it got to be probably about 60 percent that I was foraging,but I started to realize, wait a second, what if I were to forage for water as well?

[00:17:51] Isabel Friend: Because our ancient ancestors mostly, preferentially, drank wild spring water. And so I started harvesting from springs and [00:18:00] that was It's easily the most profound thing that I've ever done for my health, subtle but potent, and not only physiologically, but psychologically, mentally, emotionally, it gave me such a greater sense of presence and groundedness, such a greater command over my own emotions, my own vitality, my own sense of well being, my capacity to communicate with my partner at the time just radically shifted.

[00:18:29] Isabel Friend: I mean, so [00:18:30] many little things. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that, you know, we're one of the, Only one of the one of first generations, if not the first generation that we actually drink water. That's not from the place where we are. We're actually not woven into the watershed that nature has designed us to be a part of.

[00:18:46] Isabel Friend: We're meant to share a bloodstream with every living being within our watershed. You know, when water is outside of us, we call it water. When it's inside of us, we call it blood. But fundamentally, it's the same living organism. And it's what creates this, [00:19:00] this oneness. in the, in And sense of belonging in the ecosystem and the watershed where we live.

[00:19:05] Isabel Friend: And yet we're shipping water in from Fiji and the Alps and Evian, France, and these different places. When we start drinking wild spring water, there's this sense of. Groundedness that comes in and not only that, but it's, it's the healthiest water bar none that we can be drinking. It is straight from the earth.

[00:19:24] Isabel Friend: It is pristinely clean. It is, has a beautiful mineral [00:19:30] profile. If you drink it fresh, it has a much higher hydrogen content. It has the electromagnetic magnetic. vibratory information from geomagnetic rock formations in the earth and all of in the Schumann resonance and all of these different factors that make it therapeutic living vibrant water.

[00:19:48] Isabel Friend: It's entirely different. It is, it cannot even be put in the same category as the highly industrialized, highly processed waters that we're accustomed to drinking. And I started to [00:20:00] realize that most of the reason why people don't have an experience of water being this miraculous substance, you know, holy water is spoken of in every single religion.

[00:20:09] Isabel Friend: It's all around the world, not just religions, but indigenous practices as well. Holy water is a sacred substance. Why don't we have an experience of water as being holy? Because the water that we come into contact with has been denatured and devitalized to such an extent. It hardly even resembles it's.

[00:20:25] Isabel Friend: It's, it's wild truth and I've spoken to so many people who have had similar [00:20:30] experiences where they start drinking wild spring water, and they realize as soon as they get that first fresh taste of that pristine living water. I can't tell you how many people I've heard say similar things along the lines of, I realized I had never actually drunk water before in my life until I had that taste.

[00:20:48] Isabel Friend: And the way that it absorbs into your cells and the vitality that you get. I mean, it is pure hydroelectric energy, right? Like we are bodies of water. Our prana, our mana, our chi, our vitality is a direct [00:21:00] measurement of our hydration. It's a one to one ratio. You can't separate them because it's the water in your body that conducts the prana, that conducts that electromagnetism and that life force.

[00:21:09] Isabel Friend: We even use the same, measurement to measure them. We use the phase angle test to measure your hydration. That measures how much voltage is that your cell membrane. So it's literally how much voltage do you have in your body? So I started drinking this living vibrant water and suddenly I came alive in another way and I felt more myself than I had before.

[00:21:29] Isabel Friend: And I started [00:21:30] to realize, wow, you know, I've. been devoting my path to nutrition because I believed that you are what you eat and human beings have incredible untapped potential. If we were just eating the right things, then, you know, we would be able to tap into this incredible reservoir of potential and vitality.

[00:21:45] Isabel Friend: And then I started to realize, wait a second, the water we drink is so much more important than the food that we eat because. If you're dehydrated, you can't even absorb the nutrients that you're eating anyways. It is the osmotic flow of water that brings those nutrients into your [00:22:00] body and helps you to absorb them.

[00:22:01] Isabel Friend: and to put them to use in the body, there's not a single process of digestion or of even thought processes. Processes as we're speaking together right now, every single thing in the body is mediated by water. So it's the quality of water that determines our health more than anything else. And that's when I discovered the work of Victor Schauberger, who was a naturalist from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and he had a better understanding of water than our modern hydrologists will get to [00:22:30] even in the next several hundred years at the rate that we're going right now.

[00:22:33] Isabel Friend: And, So I started studying his work on living energies and living water and water and ecosystems and started to realize, wow, it's not just health. Like health was kind of my doorway into it, but that water also holds the keys for environmental restoration. For climatological balance for free energy generation, for economics, politics, sociology.

[00:22:57] Isabel Friend: I started going down the realms [00:23:00] of studying water religions, like a gamma tier tie studied with water priest out in Indonesia for a while. I've done ceremonies with. a number of indigenous water wisdom keepers and, and looked into the scriptural teachings and major religions. And, and so even spirit, even spiritually water holds the keys to humanity's greatest questions.

[00:23:17] Isabel Friend: And I just realized as I started to tumble down this rabbit hole, like I can do nothing other than devote myself to life itself. And water is life. Absolutely.

[00:23:27] Dr. Katie Deming: And I think that, [00:23:30] when we talk about the water and the charge, you know, this brings back to we did a prior episode with Gerald Pollack.

[00:23:37] Dr. Katie Deming: And if people remember, is that when you have When you're the water that you're holding is structured, it has a negative charge and this negative charge is important for us as electromagnetic beings. And if you doubt that we're electromagnetic beings, as a doctor, I know that when we want to see how someone's heart is functioning.

[00:23:58] Dr. Katie Deming: We do an EKG, [00:24:00] right? And it's like, this is, we are electromagnetic EEGs when we want to look at brain activities. What is MRI is looking at the changes in the, you know, charge between the cells and EMGs are looking at the, you know, charge in the muscles. So we are electromagnetic beings. And that that charge that Gives us life comes from the water when it's appropriately structured.

[00:24:27] Dr. Katie Deming: And this is why when [00:24:30] people are not connecting with water in the way or, you know, doing the things that will help them. Get hydrated and, you know, hold the, I don't want to say hold the water, but like that your water is healthy, then that's where vitality comes from. And as we diminish that, and we don't, you know, do the things to hydrate ourselves and have healthy waters, we basically have diminished life.

[00:24:57] Dr. Katie Deming: And you can see that on someone's EKG, when [00:25:00] someone is near death, you'll see, you know, the amplitude of that, you know, measurement on the EKG is lowered. So I just want to tie that back to, I have a lot of people who follow me, who are doctors and whatever, and it's like talking about the charge and everything.

[00:25:12] Dr. Katie Deming: This is like directly related to us as electromagnetic beings and the water is. The charge that brings the life into us, you know, without water, we don't have life, right? You can't find life without water. And so there's that charge piece.

[00:25:27] Isabel Friend: and when you do the phase angle readings of people who are [00:25:30] close to death, I mean, you know, you're not going to find a, a cancer patient with.

[00:25:35] Isabel Friend: phase angle reading above about a five, like usually it's like 4. 5 or below, which shows that just from a hydration standpoint, they're already so dry that they're nearly dead. Cancer can't exist in a perfectly well hydrated, you know, proteome rich structured water environment. It's just not possible because the cellular voltage is so high at that point, when you're really well, when you're really well hydrated, that cancer can't survive in [00:26:00] there.

[00:26:00] Dr. Katie Deming: Yeah. And can you just describe what is a, like an optimal phase angle? So people know that.

[00:26:05] Isabel Friend: Yeah. So the phase angle goes up to about 12 and, you know, around three, you're pretty much dead. And then the general, you know, when we're born, we're probably about a 12, but then it just kind of slightly declines over time.

[00:26:19] Isabel Friend: In fact, it's been said, I think Dr. Ishihara Yumi was the one who said that aging is just a process of. Dr. Zach Bush said if we could still stay perfectly well hydrated in the intracellular environment, [00:26:30] aging would slow down if not completely reverse. So age itself is just a measure of the gradual drop off of your phase angle in some ways.

[00:26:38] Isabel Friend: biological aging at least, obviously not chronological, but I would say the general bell curve for your average population is going to be somewhere around like six to eight. 7 to 8. Generally, yeah,

[00:26:54] Dr. Katie Deming: I think it's helpful just to have that range so that they are referenced so that they understand what, what are we going [00:27:00] for?

[00:27:00] Dr. Katie Deming: What would be ideal? I know that you are a water educator. This is like what you're doing, you know, so many things actually, touching waters and in all the ways and activism, you know, ecologically as well. But if someone were to come to you and to say, Where do I start in getting hydrated?

[00:27:21] Isabel Friend: What do you say to them? Yeah. So this is the question that I get more often than anything else. You know, people book me for a one on [00:27:30] one consultation and it's just like, okay, let's look at where you're at. Let's look at your starting point. Let's look at the water that you're currently drinking. And then working within people's lifestyle and working within people's budgets and within people's health goals and priorities, there are a number of different paths that we can go down from there.

[00:27:45] Isabel Friend: But I have a basic, protocol that I recommend for everyone, or a series of steps. And you want to make sure to cover each of these steps if you can. So the first step is forage. If possible, and if you can forage for water, then you can cut out the rest [00:28:00] of the steps if you have a high quality spring nearby, that is going to be the best water for you bar none.

[00:28:07] Isabel Friend: And then you don't even need the rest of the fancy water alchemy tools, because all of the rest of the steps are just about bringing whatever water you do have access to back into its spring quality. State. So we can mimic the geological processes that happen at a spring to whatever water we have access to, to make sure that we're drinking spring water, even if we can't go [00:28:30] and harvest it wild.

[00:28:31] Isabel Friend: But there's something really special about harvesting it wild. So that's my number one recommendation. And if anyone wants to take on that practice, you can go to findaspring. com. to find your local springs. and if you go to waterslife. shop, you can find a number of spring water testing kits to make sure that it's high quality.

[00:28:49] Isabel Friend: You can find spring water harvesting tools like big glass gallon carboys and things like that, carrying handles and that sort of thing. And it's really worth the pilgrimage. I know a lot of times when [00:29:00] people first hear this, they're like, what? I'm not gonna go drink water from the ground, but you know, it's It's promise you it's cleaner than what's coming out of a New York City tap, you know, and all of the chemicals that are in there.

[00:29:12] Isabel Friend: And yet a lot of people don't think twice about that. So nature has this, this beautiful filtration system that we call geology and then water moves through many, many layers of soil and rock and clay and just perfectly filters and also matures the water. Along the way. So the first step is forage. We can go [00:29:30] deeper into that if you want, if you're curious.

[00:29:31] Isabel Friend: I want to make sure we get to all of them. So the second is if you don't have access to wild spring water then You want to filter whatever water you do have access to. So filtration is important. And this is because water has fundamentally all of the same needs that we have. We are bodies of water. And so, you know, most of the time people think that healthy water is just clean water.

[00:29:54] Isabel Friend: But that's like saying, Oh, I'm clean. I took a shower today and therefore I'm healthy. Obviously our health is a, is a [00:30:00] broad range of a number of different factors. And the same is true with water. Water also needs hygiene. That's why we need to filter the water, but her health is dependent on a broad range of factors.

[00:30:08] Isabel Friend: So filtration is only the first step. the next step. Is structure. So sounds like your audience is already very well familiar with structure by now. You've had Dr. Pollack on. I'm sure you've talked about it at length. So I'm not going to belabor the topic a lot, but this is basically because Just like we have a need for movement and for community, and our health really [00:30:30] suffers if we're in isolation, really suffers if we're stagnant.

[00:30:33] Isabel Friend: The same is true of water. When she is stagnant, those structural bonds start to loosen and disintegrate from one another. And then you get these individual Water molecules that are just kind of bouncing around and their hydrogen bonds are forming and breaking apart billions of times per second. And so there's no time for them to snuggle up and communicate and exchange information with one another, which is what we call, you know, the conductivity of structured, water.

[00:30:58] Isabel Friend: And this is also kind of the biology of a [00:31:00] cancer cell as well, is that it becomes very individualistic and very kind of out for itself. And so there's this kind of mirroring that happens, you know, in our biology based on the water that we're drinking. In fact, Victor Schauberger called what we call bulk water now called carcinogenic water.

[00:31:15] Isabel Friend: So, we want to make sure that the. Molecules are in a formation that they have community. I think of, the structural formations as being like the culture, the community within the water, and then one of the biggest ways, and there are many ways to structure your water, but [00:31:30] one of the biggest ways that nature uses.

[00:31:31] Isabel Friend: And again, we're just mimicking nature and all of these processes is movement is flow is either vortexing or flow forms or something like that. so it's filter structure. Balance is the next step and balance is mostly making sure that water is eating properly and breathing properly, just like we need to eat and breathe.

[00:31:51] Isabel Friend: Water also needs to eat and breathe. We partake of the earth element when we eat food that was grown in the soil or food that ate food that was grown in the soil. And water as [00:32:00] the universal solvent will dissolve minerals and electrolytes into herself to create that well nourished mineral profile. So you want a good Balanced TDS or total dissolved solids in there.

[00:32:15] Isabel Friend: so you can do this by adding a pinch of high quality salt. In fact, most of the ways that, Dr Batmanghelidj was actually able to cure people just using hydration protocol was with what he called the water cure, and it was involving adding high quality salt back [00:32:30] to water, but there are a number of different kinds of electrolytes that you can use.

[00:32:33] Isabel Friend: And then also making sure that the water is breathing properly. So just like we need to breathe oxygen need, or, water needs to exchange gases like oxygen and carbonic acid, and even dissolved gases, like molecular hydrogen, which is my favorite to infuse in water. If you do it in a, if you do it in a good way, there's a lot of swag that does more harm than good.

[00:32:50] Isabel Friend: But if you have high quality molecular hydrogen in the water, that makes it incredibly hydrating. That is like. Pure vitality for yourselves and just supports your mitochondria so [00:33:00] beautifully in creating the ATP that keeps that intracellular fluid really well structured. so there's the aeration, and that's all part of the balance step.

[00:33:08] Isabel Friend: Another part of the balance step is microbiome health. So we, obviously, you know, we are a diverse ecosystem within ourselves of different, microbes, microorganisms, micro, we've got a micro.

[00:33:21] Isabel Friend: We've got, you know, little mushrooms and little viruses and little bacterias and all these helpful little critters [00:33:30] inside of ourselves. In fact, we have 1. 3 other organisms for every one of our own cells. We need that diversity. And so does water. And we don't often think of water as being a, a diverse living organism because in all of our, treatment processes are very industrialized Processing, kind of stripping water, denature, denaturing water, we sterilize it.

[00:33:55] Isabel Friend: So the important thing in transporting water from one place to another is if it's going to be [00:34:00] stagnant, it has to be sterile. Because otherwise it's going to grow, you know, bacteria or something in it. But natural water, straight from a spring, is one of nature's most robust probiotics. It creates, it contains, a range of incredibly healthy microorganisms that our biology expects of us.

[00:34:20] Isabel Friend: So this is the water that our ancestors have been preferentially drinking for countless millennia. And our biology expects this. Living [00:34:30] information. It expects the genetic information from these little microorganisms. And when we don't have that, you know, our health suffers as a result, our, our ability to, you know, produce enough serotonin that's almost all produced in the gut.

[00:34:42] Isabel Friend: All of these downstream effects on not only our physiology, but our psychology come. We don't have that diverse microbiome that water can help us with. So restoring the microbiome to water is another part of the balance step. And then the last step Is [00:35:00] energize. Second to last step. The last step for the drinking water is energized.

[00:35:02] Isabel Friend: So, when water is in a formation, it can store information. So we put these water molecules into a formation when we structure the water, and now we're going to give it the information. So just like we need quality environment, quality education, quality entertainment, and that gives us a good quality character, you know, you're gonna have a good time.

[00:35:25] Isabel Friend: They have a much different level of maturity if you're only exposed to like horror movies and [00:35:30] porn and reality TV for your life versus if you, you know, have good quality education and good quality communication and, and, conversations and that sort of thing. So we want to make sure that water is exposed to high quality stimuli, frequencies, vibrations, because she's going to take on that information and become a physical vessel.

[00:35:51] Isabel Friend: Of those vibratory fields and deliver them into ourselves. This is one of water's primary roles. Actually, it's to be the conduit of [00:36:00] electromagnetic forces that inform our body as to how to function. for example, light frequencies, you know, Dolph Zantiga says that all light is fundamentally is a bundle of frequencies that has to be brought in.

[00:36:13] Isabel Friend: By the right water. So light itself doesn't take any effect whatsoever on biological life forms, except through the phase changes of water. And this is true on a global scale. If we're talking about fluctuating sea surface temperatures and cloud microphysics, or we're talking about [00:36:30] our bodies and our own circadian rhythms and how, you know, we need a spectrum of light frequencies in order to function optimally at our best, because we are these quantum water batteries.

[00:36:42] Isabel Friend: And Water needs to have that full spectrum. It needs to have the full palette of colors to paint with if it's going to paint the, you know, grand magnum opus of our health within us. So there are a few ways of bringing those vibrations back to water. I really love the Analemma wand. It gives the water the full spectrum of [00:37:00] light frequencies.

[00:37:00] Isabel Friend: You could also use something like an infopathy pad, which Can program your water with very specific frequencies. You know, you can actually replace your entire supplement cabinet just by creating at home homeopathic remedies by downloading vibrational fields of whatever supplement, whatever nutrient, whatever vitamin, you know, whatever it is that you're, that your body is, is needing.

[00:37:20] Isabel Friend: You can download that directly into the water and then drink it in that way with no side effects. It's just a beautifully safe way to take in,medicines, medicinal treatments. So [00:37:30] there's the energizing step. And then the final step. Has less to do with the drinking water itself and more to do with what we started off with discussing, which is the lifestyle factors.

[00:37:40] Isabel Friend: So we already covered a little bit of that, but that's, that's generally the, the basics one on one of where to start is forage if you can. And if you can't filter structure balance and energize your water and then prime your body with lifestyle to make sure you can absorb that water.

[00:37:54] Dr. Katie Deming: That is beautiful.

[00:37:57] Dr. Katie Deming: And I love the simplicity of. [00:38:00] The spring water, you know, it's like, because this is the one thing that people, you know, as I've started talking about water and people are like, well, what do you do with your water? And, you know, I've been doing these multiple steps and then they're like, wow, that's number 1, it's getting expensive.

[00:38:14] Dr. Katie Deming: Number 2, it's complicated. And, and the. I love that the spring water is just like, is actually the best water like that is the best water that we could be drinking. But then I think the one thing that I hear from people is that they get so overwhelmed [00:38:30] that then they don't do anything.

[00:38:31] Dr. Katie Deming: So can you speak to that?

[00:38:34] Dr. Katie Deming: So

[00:38:34] Dr. Katie Deming: say someone can't get spring water, and they're, you know, stuck with the filters that they have that, you know, the carbon filters that are not really filtering things out of their water. Like Brita or Pure or whatever and they're just like I can't afford to go buy some expensive filter and I don't have spring water like what do you say to them because one of the things that I say is that it's important that you're drinking water, you know, saying don't stop [00:39:00] drinking water because you can't do these things because then this is like You know, getting some water into your system, but I'm wondering kind of what do you say to these people?

[00:39:08] Dr. Katie Deming: Or maybe you're not, you're not hearing these, these things, but it's, to me, it's like people get overwhelmed and then they almost shut down to it and they don't know where to start if they don't have the money and they don't have access to

[00:39:19] Isabel Friend: a spring. Absolutely. Well, I would say that, you know, either you pay now or you pay later and that it's worth saving up for the, again, it's not that your body needs water, your body.

[00:39:29] Isabel Friend: [00:39:30] Is water you are investing in what you are made of and it is the most effective way to avoid downstream medical bills And so it's worth saving up for you know And I recognize that a lot of the tools don't feel really accessible, but i've seen so many Cases at this point of people's lives radically transforming that if they had known in the beginning of their water journey, the difference that it would make, they easily would have prioritized it much, much sooner and that, you [00:40:00] know, we go chasing all of these.

[00:40:02] Isabel Friend: Band Aids, but if the root cause is dehydration, then we're going to save ourselves a lot by just addressing that first. So that's what I would say. Either get a filter or your body becomes the filter. You will absorb whatever it is that you are not filtering out from the water. so at the very least you need filtration.

[00:40:21] Isabel Friend: And there are a lot of, you know, I have a course called Navigating the Waters that teaches free DIY ways to do each one of those steps, free [00:40:30] or nearly free. So those methods are very accessible, but they are not as effective. So it's, you put in a little bit more elbow grease, but, you know, you, you get to save up for a good high quality thing.

[00:40:44] Isabel Friend: If your, if your primary objective is just convenience, that you don't want to take all of those steps. Because of the time that goes into it or because of the level, it seems like it's complex. Really, you just need one tool for each of those steps. There are some tools that overlap many tools that [00:41:00] energize will also structure, for example, and vice versa, but there's only one thing on the market that actually does all of those steps for you, except the lifestyle.

[00:41:07] Isabel Friend: You have to do that yourself, but

[00:41:08] Isabel Friend: That's why I created waters like dot shop. So people just have a directory that they can go to and say, you know, okay, I need filtration or I need electrolytes and it's all well vetted and it's stuff that you know is really high quality. And so hopefully that makes it easier for people.

[00:41:23] Isabel Friend: Like if you take it on as play and as a hobby and as enjoyment, instead of like, Oh, I gotta [00:41:30] do this for my health. Then it can just be this, there's a really fun exercise. Exploration of like, oh, what happens if I do this to the water, then how do I feel and how does it taste different and you just start noticing all of these subtleties and getting more attuned to it and it actually just becomes a really joyous experience because you're actually cultivating a relationship.

[00:41:49] Isabel Friend: You know, water is the most intimate relationship we will ever have in our entire lives. We drink this and it becomes us. And it is so sensitive and sentient and [00:42:00] aware that, you know, as you see water, water is seeing you. As you taste water, water is tasting you. Water knows the flavor of your sweat. Water knows the texture of the inside of your blood vessels.

[00:42:12] Isabel Friend: No lover you will ever have in your life will know you that intimately, and we have the opportunity to cultivate this very loving, nourishing, reciprocal Mutual communion with this very ancient, wise, living substance that has an incredible amount of [00:42:30] insight and intelligence just waiting to be tapped into.

[00:42:34] Isabel Friend: So don't be daunted by it. Be in awe of it. You know, don't be put off by, you know, habits that you feel like you have to take on. Be, be inspired by a relationship that you get to cultivate. Well, and I think that

[00:42:47] Dr. Katie Deming: that's so important that idea of being curious, and it's this relationship of building a relationship with water and I think some of this requires [00:43:00] deconditioning, we've been conditioned to think of water.

[00:43:03] Dr. Katie Deming: In one way, like an inert substance that like in medicine, it's like, that's the inert substance that you'd use to wash down the medicine, but it's when you start to see the water as becoming part of us and this living being and relationship that you're developing with it. It totally shifts that idea of like, now this becomes almost like ceremonial, like, you know, connecting with the water.

[00:43:29] Dr. Katie Deming: And, you [00:43:30] know, that's one of the things that my mentor has always said, if you did only one spiritual practice, connect with the water, bless the water. And, so it's like, when you start to think of water in this different way, it can be fun and it can be playful. And then also. You're gonna pay at some point and this is what we see with our lifestyle right now that we are paying for the lifestyle of modern society with Epidemic proportions of chronic illness, you know diabetes [00:44:00] obesity neurodegenerative Disease cancers like we're already paying the price and water Is when you think about it, it sounds expensive and it sounds complicated.

[00:44:10] Dr. Katie Deming: And for me, you know, currently I do reverse osmosis and then I use the vitalizer plus to structure my water. and that whole thing doesn't take me any time at all. And also when you look at the investment, it. It wasn't it hasn't been that much to just do that and I'm not all the way, you know, My goal is to get the spring aqua [00:44:30] and I'm saving up for that myself because these systems, you know They are an investment, but they're an investment in our health and so Thinking about it that way, that this is one of the most powerful things that you can invest in for your health and well being and also for your consciousness, describing that when you started drinking the spring water, it just, you know, woke you up in a different way.

[00:44:54] Dr. Katie Deming: And this is something that also, I see as well. I, um, have to comment [00:45:00] on Victor Schauberger's, quote of water, like bulk water, just water as we describe it being carcinogenic water is like, wow, I hadn't heard that quote, but that is really telling, so

[00:45:13] Isabel Friend: interesting. Yeah, well, what we do to water we do to ourselves.

[00:45:17] Isabel Friend: She's the primordial mirror. And so the water we drink will absolutely always reflect on our physiology and our psychology. And so if that water is disconnected, then it creates more disconnection [00:45:30] in our biology and in our lives. You know, I can't tell you as well, how many times I'll have a client that comes to me with, Aspects of their personal lives that really reflect the water that they're drinking as well.

[00:45:42] Isabel Friend: So You know, for example, I had a client who she was feeling really disconnected from her husband and she was like, you know, if I zoom out, I can see that he's really actually supportive, but on a daily basis, I just don't feel supported at all. I don't feel connected. I don't feel like he's [00:46:00] showing up for me.

[00:46:00] Isabel Friend: Well, she had been drinking. Reverse osmosis water, which is, you know, extremely bulk. There's, there's no connection in those water molecules at all. And so we got her drinking more structured, high quality water. And, you know, similar to my experience, when I started drinking spring water, the communication just started flowing a lot more easily.

[00:46:20] Isabel Friend: I've worked with a couple Kangen water for a little while, which I do not recommend. I don't recommend direct electrolysis to water because you're electrocuting the water. [00:46:30] You're zapping it, you're. You know, it basically zaps up the whole process of electrolysis zaps apart that hydrogen bonds. And so these people, these couple people that I worked with, and I've noticed this a little bit in that community in general, is they're just kind of like snappy and just kind of zippy and just kind of a little bit like.

[00:46:50] Isabel Friend: I don't know, jolty, I don't know how to describe it, but there's like this, um, yeah, they, they almost kind of like are right on the edge in a way. [00:47:00] And, um, and I'm like, wow, you know, actually it kind of makes sense in a way. If you're electrocuting your water, you would just have like a little bit more like kind of energy in your field.

[00:47:09] Isabel Friend: So what we do to water, we do to ourselves and, you know, being really well hydrated truly just lubricates everything in our system. You want, you know, we talk about how a lot of chronic disease is based on the emotional patterns that are stored in the body. Well, when you're really well hydrated, your body isn't storing those [00:47:30] emotional patterns as well, because it's in the destructuring that the disharmony, the.

[00:47:35] Isabel Friend: the lack of symmetry in the molecular bonds where those memories get stored. It's in those dried out crispy places in the fascia that the water can't get to. Those stagnant dried out areas in the fascia where a lot of those memories are stored. It's been said that the body keeps the score but it's actually the body of water that keeps the score and when you are really well lubricated and really well hydrated.[00:48:00]

[00:48:00] Isabel Friend: It is easier for you to be present and in tune with your emotions as they happen so that you don't have to store them for later. Your subconscious doesn't have to hang on to this for a future time when you have the bandwidth and the capacity to process it because you have that bandwidth and capacity.

[00:48:15] Isabel Friend: You literally have more capacitance because Your bio water is the capacitator of all of this electromagnetic energy that flows through your body. So, you know, even, even stressful experiences just don't stress us [00:48:30] out as much. And so, you know, even the psychosomatic illnesses, they just don't show up as much because we're just not as stressed out when we're well, when we're well hydrated.

[00:48:39] Dr. Katie Deming: That's also fascinating. And actually, I would love to have you back at some point in the future and talk about the emotions and consciousness and how that is all tied to water. But this has been such a great, for me, I learned so much. I, you are just a wealth of knowledge. I've listened to so many of your things and I have.[00:49:00]

[00:49:00] Dr. Katie Deming: Your, hydration water workbook for people who, yeah. So I saw that. And, so if people are looking for, ways to connect with you and to learn more about your, you know, what you're doing in the world, which is so amazing with water, please tell us how they can find you and we will have links to the things that you reference here in our show

[00:49:21] Isabel Friend: notes.

[00:49:22] Isabel Friend: Awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you again so much for having me on. It's just been a pleasure to chat with you and I love what you're doing. I love the whole ethos of this [00:49:30] podcast and yeah, I hope that lots of people get to hear all of the amazing guests that you have on and all of the brilliant wisdom that you're bringing forward because As you know, I think it's some of the most important stuff we can possibly be talking about as humans right now.

[00:49:43] Isabel Friend: So I just want to really honor and acknowledge you for doing this. And if people want to get more, in touch with what I'm doing and what I'm up to, I have, the shop, as I mentioned, is waterslife. shop. That's where you can get all the tools. I have an academy, waterslife. academy. And that is Filled with [00:50:00] courses and webinars and workbooks, memberships, community, all of that kind of thing.

[00:50:05] Isabel Friend: So you can really tap in. I'm on Instagram at Jen Isabel friend on Instagram.

[00:50:10] Isabel Friend: And, and that's it. Oh, and we also have retreats coming up. so a couple times a year, I host water retreats. So lots of opportunities to dive into the water world. I love it.

[00:50:21] Isabel Friend: Well,

[00:50:21] Dr. Katie Deming: thank you again for being here. And I actually look forward to bringing you back if you'll be willing to come back and talk to my

[00:50:27] Isabel Friend: audience. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you, Katie. [00:50:30] Have a beautiful day. You too.