Episode #47 - Kevin Preston

I want to start this post by saying something that took me a very long time to truly believe: your body is not making a mistake.

It is not attacking itself. It is not broken. It is not your enemy. It is doing the most extraordinary thing it knows how to do, which is communicate with you. Every ache, every flare-up, every bout of exhaustion, every autoimmune diagnosis that left you feeling like your own body had declared war on you, is actually a message. A desperate, persistent, loving attempt from your own biology to get your attention.

I know this because I lived the other story first. As a menopausal woman who spent over a decade on pharmaceuticals for an autoimmune condition, I genuinely believed something was wrong with me. That label on that piece of paper felt like my identity. It was not until I began to step outside of the conventional model that I could look back and see the truth so clearly: I was not ill. I was out of balance.

That shift in perspective changed my life. And this episode of The Eversio Experience is for everyone who is ready for that same shift.

Dr. Kevin Preston is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner based in Armstrong, BC, in the interior of British Columbia. He is the visionary behind the New Human Interstellar Events, a gathering that our entire Eversio Wellness team had the privilege of attending last fall. I can tell you with complete honesty: we are still integrating it. Kevin's work sits at the intersection of ancient Eastern medicine and the evolution of human consciousness, and when I say his presence is felt through a screen, I mean it. If you have ever stumbled across one of his Instagram reels while he is standing deep in a BC forest speaking straight to your soul, you already know what I mean.

Make yourself a big cup of tea. This one goes deep.

Chapter 1: Why Are So Many of Us Sick? The Root Cause Perspective from Traditional Chinese Medicine

Autoimmune disease. Chronic fatigue. Hormonal dysregulation. Anxiety. These are not niche conditions anymore. They are epidemic. And when Dr. Desiree asked Kevin to speak to what is actually happening at a root level for so many of us humans, his answer was both simple and profound.

"There is a principle in Chinese medicine that I have loved for many years," he said. "To live in harmony with nature. And I think we are at a time where that is not happening. The degree to which someone is out of harmony with their own inner nature and the world around them is usually proportionate to the disturbance, the imbalance, the disease they are experiencing in the body."

This is the cornerstone of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM): the body and the mind are not separate systems, and the body does not malfunction randomly. It responds to its environment. When we are chronically disconnected, from nature, from our emotions, from our authentic selves, the body will escalate its signals until we listen.

Kevin has been in clinical practice for nearly two decades and has seen thousands of patients. What he comes back to again and again is the same question: where is the disharmony? Not just in the physical body, but in the whole life of the person sitting across from him. The job they hate. The relationship that drains them. The grief they have never let themselves feel. The childhood that trained them to override every signal their body sent.

Chapter 2: The Body Does Not Make Mistakes - Rethinking Autoimmune Disease

Here is the part of this conversation that genuinely stopped me in my tracks, even though I have been doing this work for years.

Kevin made the case that the conventional medical framing of autoimmune disease, the idea that the body is attacking itself, is fundamentally backwards.

"The body would never inherently attack itself," he said. "It is quite anti-life. Our bodies are so divinely built that there is inherent intelligence already in there. When you cut yourself, it just automatically heals. So if that is not happening, it means there is a disturbance in the body, or the body is under-resourced."

Think about that. The body knows how to heal. It has known since before you were born. When it stops healing efficiently, when inflammation runs rampant, when the immune system appears to turn inward, that is not failure. That is a system under impossible strain, crying for help.

In TCM, rather than suppressing symptoms (which Kevin describes as "shoving things deeper into the body, locking them in the closet and hoping for a good result"), the practitioner asks: where is the root disturbance? What is this body carrying that it has never been given the space to process? And in nearly twenty years of clinical practice, Kevin has arrived at a consistent truth:

"Everything comes from an emotional and mental standpoint. The physical manifestation is the last thing to show up."

I cannot tell you how much this mirrors my own journey. The pharmaceutical trail I was on for over a decade was addressing symptoms that were, at their core, the physical expression of a life deeply out of alignment. It was not until I began asking different questions, including root cause questions, that real healing became possible.

Chapter 3: The Override Culture and Why We Stop Listening to Our Bodies

One of the threads woven throughout this entire conversation is something Kevin calls "override culture," and honestly, I think it is the single most important concept in understanding why so many of us end up sick.

Kevin grew up in rural Alberta, in farming and construction environments where the message was clear: if you are sick, tired, or injured, it does not matter. Get the job done. Push through. And this is not just a rural or male experience. How many of us, especially women who are mothers, caregivers, professionals, were taught from childhood to not listen to our bodies, to override discomfort, to keep going no matter what?

I think of myself as a battery. When I started to shift, I began noticing the leaks, the drains. That conversation, that environment, that commitment I said yes to when every cell in my body said no. And then I started noticing what charged me: a walk outside, time in the forest, stillness, a real conversation with someone I trusted. The game changed when I stopped overriding and started listening.

Kevin points to the natural world as the perfect mirror for this. Animals do not stay in environments that are making them sick. A herd of deer in contaminated water will move. They do not rationalize. They do not push through. They follow the intelligence of their biology.

We have a frontal lobe that allows us to override that intelligence, and it is both our greatest gift and, when misused, our greatest liability.

The whispers, if you hear them, mean you never have to hear the scream. The early signals, the tiredness, the irritability, the recurrent infections, are the body making a gentle course correction. If we keep silencing those signals, the body will escalate. And that escalation is what we eventually call disease.

Chapter 4: The Emotional Roots of Physical Illness - What Your Organs Are Actually Telling You

This section of our conversation blew my mind, and I say that as someone who has been on a holistic health journey for years. Kevin walked us through the TCM understanding of which emotions correspond to which organ systems, and the clinical patterns he sees every single day.

The Liver and Anger. The Kidneys and Fear. The Spleen and Overthinking.

"Just talking about those three alone," Kevin said, "will explain probably almost every autoimmune condition and chronic inflammatory condition that we have."

And then there are the lungs, which in TCM correspond to grief and sadness. Kevin looks at every patient with chronic bronchitis, recurrent pneumonia, or asthma and asks: how much grief, perhaps even ancestral grief, is being held here that has never been processed or felt?

He then shared one of the most striking clinical stories I have ever heard: a patient who had received twelve iron infusions over several years and was still profoundly anemic. Twelve. The body simply could not absorb or retain the iron, regardless of how much was pumped in.

When Kevin went deeper with her, what emerged was that this patient could not receive love. When he asked her to rate herself on a scale of one to ten for unconditional self-love, she answered: one.

"Of course your body cannot receive the iron," he told her. "Of course your body cannot locate, absorb, or receive any kind of nourishment, mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually. Your body is hemorrhaging love that you are not holding for yourself."

This is not a metaphor. This is the clinical reality that Kevin sees every week. And it is one that the conventional system does not have a framework for, because it was never designed to ask these questions.

The invitation here is real: if you are pouring supplements, iron infusions, or any other form of nourishment into a body that does not feel safe to receive, the impact will be minimal. The work of receiving, of opening, of learning to love yourself, is not soft or peripheral. It is the medicine.

Chapter 5: Feel Your Feelings - The Most Underrated Healing Tool Available to You

Kevin told us that he looked back over his patient week and genuinely could not remember a single session where someone had not cried. Not because he engineers it, but because when people are given real presence, real spaciousness, and the feeling of being truly witnessed, something in them exhales.

I shared something with Kevin during this episode that I have not spoken about often publicly. At his New Human event last fall, I sat in the front row. There was a woman beside me whom I had never met before. She lived on the other side of the country. We were in a guided meditation, and I felt her begin to shake. Something in that, in her willingness to go there, allowed me to go deeper than I had ever gone in my own emotional work. I ugly cried in a way I have never done in my life.

When we were brought back, she and I looked at each other, strangers, and held each other for three minutes. Something was released in both of us that retreat had been holding for a long time.

What Kevin says about the power of being witnessed is profound, and it is backed by the wisdom of every healing tradition that has ever existed. We cannot do all of our healing alone. We need a soul witness. We need community. We need to be seen.

And for those of us who were raised to believe that crying in public is inappropriate, or that expressing emotion is weakness, let me say what I said to my friend who was going through a divorce and did not want to cry in a coffee shop:

When you cry in public, you give every other person in that room permission to feel their feelings. You invite them into their hearts. You give them a chance to access compassion. We have to become a world that believes all emotions are valid and that it is safe to feel them, not just behind closed doors.

Chapter 6: Nature Is Not a Luxury - It Is Medicine

Kevin lives in Armstrong, BC, in the interior of British Columbia, and when he talks about nature, he is not being poetic. He is prescribing.

"I have never met anybody who gets their most incredible insights, downloads, and wisdom when they are going a hundred miles an hour," he said. "The courage kicks in when you slow down, because you may get messages you do not want. A lot of people are avoiding slowing down so they can stay ahead of the truth they need to look at."

He also acknowledged what I know many of you are thinking: what if I live in a high-rise in the city? What if I cannot get to a forest?

Here is what I believe with everything in me: nature comes to you if you let it. I am lucky to have access to forest almost every day. But in my years of city living, I learned to use my senses fully when I was in nature so that I could carry it back with me. Close your eyes in your apartment and go back to the last time you stood beside a lake. Feel it. Smell it. That is a real neurological event.

A plant on your windowsill that you water and speak to. The birds in your neighbourhood that you start to get curious about. A walk in your local park instead of a doom scroll on your phone. These are not compromises. They are access points.

And this, of course, is part of why we love mushrooms at Eversio. Functional mushrooms are nature in the most bioavailable form possible. They are the mycelium beneath the forest floor, the intelligence of the earth concentrated into something you can bring into your daily life. We are not just selling a supplement. We are offering a connection.

As I said at the end of this episode, and I meant every word: there is no Wi-Fi in the forest, but the connection is incredible.

Chapter 7: Dr. Kevin's Top Recommendations for Anyone Feeling Chronically Exhausted or Out of Balance

Dr. Desiree asked Kevin the question so many of you came here for: if you could give three top things to someone who is chronically exhausted, burnt out, and not sure where to start, what would they be?

His answer was worth the whole episode.

1. Get back in harmony with your true nature.

Whatever that means for you. For Kevin, it means forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. For you, it might be something else. But the invitation is the same: get out of performance mode and into alignment with who you actually are, not who you were trained to be.

2. Slow down enough to hear what is actually true.

Kevin said something that I keep coming back to: if you tell him you are confused and do not know what to do, he will tell you that you have not stopped or slowed down long enough to receive any wisdom. The answers are in you. But you have to get quiet enough to hear them. And yes, some of those answers will be uncomfortable. That is exactly why we avoid the stillness.

3. Breathe. Deeply, intentionally, and as a practice.

He literally paused before answering this question and took a breath to model it for us. The breath is the most immediate tool you have to move your nervous system from override into receive mode. It is free. It is always available. And most of us do not actually do it.

A Note from Me: If You Have Been Waiting for Permission to Rest, This Is It

I spent more than a decade of my life believing I had a disease. That belief, as real as it felt, was borrowed from a system that did not have the tools to see the whole picture. When I finally found practitioners who could hold the full truth of my experience, people like Dr. Kevin and Dr. Desiree, my healing began in earnest.

What Kevin does in this conversation, and in his clinic and his events, is remind us of something ancient and essential: you are not broken. Your body is not your enemy. Your symptoms are not punishments. They are an invitation to come back to yourself.

At Eversio, that is why we do everything we do. The mushrooms. The podcast. The community we are building. We believe that the path back to health is the path back to wholeness: mind, body, soul, and the living world we are part of.

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs it. And when you are done reading this, go outside if you can. Even for ten minutes. Feel the air. Look at something alive.