Renew Your Mind with Dr Ashleigh Moreland. Where Science Meets Spirit. Part 2 of 2
Meet Dr Ash
Dr. Ashleigh Moreland spent over two decades navigating the mental health system, struggling with chronic health issues, dysfunctional behavior, and emotional pain, including multiple brushes with suicide. Her journey hit a breaking point at 30, where, as a single mother, she found the leverage to seek true healing and transformation. Today, she is a regulated and present mother, a connected wife, and a heart-centred leader of the global Re-MIND Institute. With a PhD in neuroplasticity and extensive training in mind-body modalities, she empowers individuals, families, and businesses to achieve emotional intelligence and create psychologically safe environments. Her work helps clients transform their struggles into strength and resilience, creating ripple effects of healing within families, teams, and communities. Through her personal experience and professional expertise, Dr. Moreland offers a unique and powerful approach to healing and living a more authentic, fulfilling life.
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Understanding the Three Key Steps to Emotional Healing
I’m looking at your page for the Remind Institute, and it talks about three steps: awareness and revelation, nervous system rewiring, and emotional and behavioral integration. One thing I think is super cool is that you've been able to use these concepts in the secular space while also drawing on Christian principles.
Dr Ash Moreland: Everything we do is based on the Bible.
Dave Quak: Even "revelation" — that’s such a Christian word!
Dr Ash Moreland: One thing I really feel strongly about when educating people is that information is science, but revelation is spiritual in nature. We don’t give people information for education. We give people revelation for transformation.
Dave Quak: Yeah, that’s good.
Dr Ash Moreland: Because someone can know everything they need to do, but that knowledge still won’t change their life. So the question is, how do you take someone deeper into their journey? It’s usually about... I have this concept I call the "romcom up Tom." It's a bit of a mouthful, but I talk about the lenses we see through. If we’ve experienced something in our past, especially in childhood, it gives us a frame of reference or a lens through which we see the world. We carry that lens and wear that prescription throughout life until we change it.
Dave Quak: Yeah.
Dr Ash Moreland: And so Remind Institute is based on Romans 12:2, where it says, “Do not conform to the patterns of this world” — in other words, don’t just come into agreement with everything you learned in the world and about the world, and about how we operate and interrelate. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Dr Ash Moreland: That really resonates with me because a lot of our adult problems stem from the worldly patterns and concepts we’ve learned, including our worldly identity. This flesh suit doesn’t go to heaven. It’s either going in the ground or in the incinerator. This flesh suit is pointless. It’s just the vessel our soul uses. Our true identity is our soul. So it comes down to identity work. We need to be transformed to think the way God thinks, to see situations and circumstances the way God sees them. This is even true in parenting.
Renewing Your Mind: How Identity Work Leads to Transformation
My husband didn’t have biological kids of his own. So when we got together, he was thrown into the deep end of learning how to be a dad. And he was operating based on the patterns of the world that he had downloaded and that he knew. But those patterns weren’t necessarily godly or Christlike. So being able to say, "If you were behaving in this way, how would Jesus parent you? How would Jesus respond to you in that moment? Would He condemn you or discipline you with harshness? Would He embarrass you?"
Dr Ash Moreland: And he said, "No." So then we asked, "What would He do? What would that look like? What would it sound like?" Using that as a way to transform his thinking, that’s literally renewing his mind and helping him see what Jesus would see in that moment and be more like Him.
Dave Quak: So many of our battles in the mind are long-term, fraught with frustration, like a spinning wheel that keeps going around. You’re back at it again, thinking, “I know I get it, I should, but I don’t know…” I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to sit in the seat of a client for a moment. So, let’s say I approach you as a practitioner just to put some legs on it. I keep circling around anger that won’t lift.
Dave Quak: It keeps coming up in my life, raising its head every now and then in a few days of fury, and then it kind of subsides. It goes round and round. So, what’s going on when that happens? That seems to link to what you were just saying. So, what’s happening when this emotional cycle occurs?
Dr Ash Moreland: There are a few things at play. First of all, people think emotions are just feelings, but they’re not. Emotions are chemical reactions in the body. So, when anger manifests a lot in our life, that’s an indicator to me that there are unprocessed chemicals from past experiences that were never adequately processed.
Dr Ash Moreland: Think about a child who hasn’t yet been tainted by the world. How does a child metabolize the chemicals of emotion? What does that look like?
Dave Quak: I don’t know.
Dr Ash Moreland: So what does a child do when they’re angry?
Dave Quak: Oh, they throw their toys on the ground or something like that.
Dr Ash Moreland: Yeah. Throwing things, screaming, stomping their feet…
Dave Quak: Throwing a fist or two, maybe.
Dr Ash Moreland: Exactly. Stomping their feet, expressing anger in any way.
Dr Ash Moreland: All of those things are the body's natural way of metabolizing those emotions. We were built to intuitively know how to process those chemicals. But then we have parents who see these behaviors as something that needs correcting, so they suppress it.
Dr Ash Moreland: If we've had these chemicals showing up in our body but haven't been able to fully metabolize them, that’s a big clue for me. When you're about to explode, it's because you’re full of these unprocessed chemicals. It only takes the tiniest little thing to push you over the edge, and the chemicals start to release.
Healing from Anger: Exploring Chemical Reactions and Stress Responses
The other side of it is our default stress response style. You've probably heard of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Dave Quak: Yeah.
Dr Ash Moreland: Anger is a flight response. And that might give me some insight into your childhood. If your default stress response is fight, that tells me how things may have been handled in your childhood home. We’d explore that by asking, “Was this a learned response, or did you feel forced into it because the other options were unavailable?”
Dr Ash Moreland: For example, if someone went into flight or freeze, completely shutting down and becoming emotionless, disengaged, and disconnected, it would make sense that the only way they were seen or heard was if they went into fight.
Dr Ash Moreland: I’m not suggesting that was your childhood experience, but that’s an example of how these patterns form.
Dave Quak: That’s a great example, because I think a lot of people can resonate with that. We often ask, “How can this help me, and why have I missed out on it?”
Dr Ash Moreland: Exactly. And a lot of parenting courses focus on how to correct a child’s behavior, but that automatically assumes the child’s behavior is either good or bad. But that’s not biblical.
Dr Ash Moreland: Biblically, God doesn’t label behaviors as good or bad. He’s equipping and empowering us to respond to our children the way He would respond to us if we were having a tantrum—with love, kindness, and compassion. Yes, sometimes there is firm conviction and correction, but it’s always done with love. God wants us to be more like Christ, not because we’re bad or naughty, but because He wants us to grow.
Dr Ash Moreland: So in the Responsive Parenting course, we go into understanding the stress responses. For me as a parent, my default stress response tends to be flight. When I’m overwhelmed, I get busy, rushing around, trying to control everything. I overwork my kids, trying to make them do things, but that’s not ideal. But understanding that, what if I’m in a flight response and my kids need my attention because their survival depends on me?
Dr Ash Moreland: What do they have to do to get my attention?
Dave Quak: Why?
Dr Ash Moreland: It’s usually pretty abrupt because I’m so deep in my flight response, I’m not present. Sometimes, I’ll hear them but not fully register what they’re saying. Then, they might start fighting with each other, and I’m brought back to the moment.
Dr Ash Moreland: And then I’m back to telling them off. “Mom’s back. We’re safe.”
Dave Quak: Yeah.
Dr Ash Moreland: It’s very bizarre. It’s a completely different way of looking at it.
Dave Quak: But I think intrinsically we sometimes know what’s going on. We’ll smell something, or something will happen, and suddenly it’ll bring us back to when we were five years old. Of course, it affects the other way too, where unresolved things just rest in our bodies, waiting to be processed.
Dr Ash Moreland: Yes, so it’s in our bodies on a physical level, but also in the mind. The mind and the brain are not the same thing. And this is where the intersection of science and spirituality really clicked for me. I used to think the brain was everything—if we just change the brain, either through neuroplasticity or medication, we could solve all our problems. But I was always really interested in the outliers—the people who didn’t respond to these approaches. So I started asking, “How can we control for every variable?” Some people respond to these treatments, and some don’t. This leads to this huge standard deviation in research. Why is that? And that’s when I started to dig deeper, beyond genetics and epigenetics.
Dr Ash Moreland: That’s when I realized the importance of understanding the mind. If you search for “mental health” on Google, it doesn’t relate to the brain. It relates to the mind. But my brain is right here, in my head, at this moment. My mind, however, can jump to 7 p.m., thinking about dinner, or back to when I was seven years old meeting a kid named Dave. I can remember that experience, but my brain can’t.
Dr Ash Moreland: We can use science and therapeutic modalities based on our physical body, but we need to understand what’s happening in the mind. What meaning is the mind assigning to things? The mind is just a meaning-making machine. For example, if someone beat me up with this bottle, you and I both know this is just a bottle. It’s neither good nor bad. But if someone used it as a weapon against me, it changes everything. My body would have a stress response because this is no longer just a bottle. It becomes a threat. My mind has assigned meaning to it, and that gets stored in my hippocampus as data.
Dr Ash Moreland: The hippocampus, right next to the amygdala, is constantly scanning for threats. It pulls out the file labeled "purple water bottle" and says, "That thing is dangerous. We need to activate the fight, flight, or freeze response, or you could die." So it’s all about how the mind assigns meaning to these objects, stories, and memories. Those conclusions are almost always distorted, but if we don’t repair that and renew our mind, we continue to see the water bottle as a threat instead of just a water bottle. We need to repair that meaning so we can see things for what they truly are.
Dave Quak: So, in practice, you help people come to grips with seeing the "water bottle" for what it really is. You can change their responses so it’s no longer an issue in the future, right?
Dr Ash Moreland: Absolutely. And that approach is quite different. Take PTSD as an example. We know PTSD doesn’t respond well to medication or traditional talk therapy. Why? Because PTSD isn’t a brain chemistry issue. Medication won’t help, and talk therapy only engages the logical part of the brain, which is ineffective for trauma.
Dr Ash Moreland: PTSD is a trauma response, and that comes from the amygdala—the survival response system. If we work directly with the hippocampus and the amygdala, it’s possible to process PTSD in one session if we have clarity on exactly what’s triggering it for someone. It really saddens me when I see society telling people they can’t heal from PTSD. The best we can do is help them manage it. That’s painful for me to hear because I know healing is possible.
Dave Quak: I can see why that would hurt, especially when you have the tools to help people. It must be frustrating, because you want to help.
Dr Ash Moreland: It’s crazy. We’ve had these conversations about educating people on the difference between psychology, psychiatry, and what we do, which is quite different. Just the other night, in a local moms group, someone posted asking for a psychologist. Based on what they described, I knew that a psychologist wouldn’t be the right fit for them. So, I commented, and the admin of the group told me, “You’re not a psychologist. Don’t comment. This person asked for a psychologist.” Then they suspended me from the group for promoting my business. But that’s never my intention. I just want people to understand this information.
Dr Ash Moreland: I feel like the whole world needs to know this. We created an entire email series to share my coaching and information with people. It’s all free because I want to help others, not to make money. A fraction of those people will want to work with me, and that’s okay. But I just want everyone to have access to this knowledge.
Dave Quak: I completely agree. You’ve provided so many great resources on your website, Facebook, and YouTube. Just a few weeks ago, you put up a post about the mind being different from the brain, and it really clicked for me.
Empowering Change Through Mind Renewal and Trauma Processing
I did a live session on that, talking about how the mind is metaphysical and the brain is physical. Even though they’re closely related, they are not the same thing. People use "world" and "earth" interchangeably, but your world is very different from mine.
Dave Quak: Yeah, that makes sense now.
Dr Ash Moreland: It does, doesn’t it? When I talk about how the mind is metaphysical and the brain is physical, it helps people understand that though they’re connected, they’re not the same. It’s like the world and the Earth—though they seem similar, they’re fundamentally different. Different people are in your world, with different relationships, biases, perceptions, and values. Your world is unique. And what encourages me is that when people feel like they’re living in a hellish situation, which is how I felt, it’s helpful to remind myself that this is a metaphysical reality. It’s not real in the physical world, and we can change it. Your whole world can transform.
Dr Ash Moreland: And that’s what the scripture talks about. When you renew your mind, the metaphysical changes, and your entire life transforms.
Dave Quak: Yeah, so true. Do you still have to juggle keeping your ADHD brain in order while doing all this? Is that something you’re dealing with constantly?
Dr Ash Moreland: All the time. And also, I’m not medicated for anything. I used to have a lot of medications. I had a whole drawer full of prescriptions with different diagnoses. Over the years, I tried various meds, but inner healing has given me the capacity to regulate my nervous system. For the most part, I’m regulated.
Dr Ash Moreland: Of course, I’m still human. There are times when stress, fear, or even issues in my business or marriage overwhelm me. But I know these emotions are transient, and I have the tools to recognize them. I also know what to do when they arise. Medication, for me, felt like I wasn’t fully me. I felt dull. I’m highly energetic, excitable, and creative. On medication, life felt gray and boring.
Dr Ash Moreland: I didn’t enjoy it. I found it flatlined me. I wanted to learn how to work with my brain, how to work with my biology, and use my ADHD as my superpower, knowing that I still have weaknesses. Sometimes I have "doom piles" in my house. Sometimes I completely blank out.
Dave Quak: What’s a doom pile?
Dr Ash Moreland: You don’t know what a doom pile is?
Dave Quak: No. What’s a doom pile?
Dr Ash Moreland: It’s when you’re overwhelmed, and you just stack everything up. I’ll shove everything into a bag, thinking, "If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind."
Dave Quak: I’ve never heard of that.
Dr Ash Moreland: Really?
Dave Quak: I can’t believe people do this!
Dr Ash Moreland: Yeah, it’s totally my thing. And that creates challenges with my husband because he really likes order and cleanliness. He knows that when my ADHD symptoms become obvious, it’s often a cue that I’m overwhelmed.
Dr Ash Moreland: Instead of getting frustrated with me for not picking up my clothes or not thinking about dinner, he uses it as a cue to ask, “Ash is overwhelmed. What does she need right now?” When my body goes into overwhelm, the front part of my brain shuts down, which is true for any human.
Dr Ash Moreland: That’s where executive function lives, but when that shuts down, it’s hard to think logically. I become more dysfunctional in my ADHD when my nervous system isn’t well managed.
Dr Ash Moreland: I’ve been studying the neuroscience of the brain, and walking has been shown to be really beneficial. It’s a rhythmic task that increases blood flow to the brain. It gives the body something to do, which allows the mind to process. So I have a walking desk under a standing desk. For tasks I struggle with, I do them while walking. It activates the front part of my brain.
Dave Quak: That takes a lot of self-discipline because there’s no one around to hold you accountable. And honestly, no one really wants to walk on one of those things. But you do it because you see the benefits.
Dr Ash Moreland: I know it helps me get things done. If I didn’t use the walking desk, I’d avoid things like invoicing or responding to messages. I use that strategy when I don’t have the mental or nervous system capacity to tackle tasks.
Dr Ash Moreland: Another strategy for me is understanding that my brain works best in the morning. This morning, I knew I had a lot of work to do before recording the podcast, so I woke up at 5:30 a.m. I did about eight hours of work between 5:30 and 8:00 a.m., and my brain was firing on all cylinders.
Dr Ash Moreland: I was task switching, opening multiple tabs, and accomplishing so much at once. If I tried to do that at 5 p.m., I’d be lucky to handle two tasks at the same time. By the evening, I just don’t have the mental or nervous system capacity to process that much. So, I plan my day accordingly. For many of my ADHD clients, I provide a variety of tactics and strategies
based on neuroscience, human behavior, and performance. I ask them to try these strategies and see which ones work for them.
Dr Ash Moreland: I’m terrible at consistency. I know that about myself. I can’t stick to a rigid schedule, like “On Mondays, I mop the floor, on Tuesdays I do this, and so on.” It just doesn’t work for me.
Dave Quak: That’s it.
Check out the Re-Mind Institute
But our social media is Remind Institute, with a hyphen between "Re" and "Mind." Also, just get on the emails. Even if you’re thinking, “I don’t want to spend money on this. I don’t want to do anything,” just get on the emails. You can unsubscribe if you don’t like it or don’t agree—that’s absolutely fine. But it's simply Remind-Institute forward slash emails, and there you’ll find a whole menu with options.
Dave Quak: Yeah.
Dr Ash Moreland: These are the key points. I really labored over this and thought about the biggest challenges, struggles, and questions my clients face across all these different pillars. My answers and perception might be different from what you’ve been led to believe previously.
Dave Quak: From other models. Got it. You also speak as an itinerant speaker if anyone's chasing you to come speak.
Dr Ash Moreland: Yes, I do. I’ve been a lecturer for 12 years, so I love speaking. I speak on any of the pillars, but my preference is to do experiential speaking. It’s not just “sage on the stage,” but actually workshop-style stuff. It’s transformational because when you ask probing questions and take people on a journey to explore, they will walk out different from how they walked in.
Dr Ash Moreland: And I think that’s the most special thing, as long as they are open to it.
Dave Quak: I’ll make sure all the links to your resources are in the show notes.
Dr Ash Moreland: Thank you!
Dave Quak: Do you have any last bit of sage advice for us before I pray for us, Ash? Any final thoughts?
Dr Ash Moreland: Don’t give up. If you think it’s done, God’s not done. One of my biggest sources of encouragement every single day is that God uses all things for my good. And if it’s not good, it’s not done. That’s something I rely on every day.
Dave Quak: That’s good.
Dr Ash Moreland: I lean on that encouragement almost daily because life is a roller coaster. Marriage is a roller coaster. Parenting is a roller coaster. Being a business owner is a roller coaster. Not everything feels good all the time, but I’m always reminded that if something is happening, it’s happening for my good. If it’s not good, it’s not done.
Dave Quak: I love that. That’s a great note to end on. Dr. Ash Moreland from the Remind Institute, would you pray for us as we finish up?
Dr Ash Moreland: It would be an absolute pleasure. Father, I thank You for this opportunity to chat today, and I thank You for Dave and his ministry. I pray that You open doors for his ministry because this will open minds, open hearts, transform lives, and help people experience Your love through this.
Dr Ash Moreland: I also pray for anyone listening who might be feeling lost, trapped, scared, or like they’re a failure or struggling with anything. Lord, if it’s not Your will, I pray that You renew their minds. I pray You give them a fresh revelation of Your truth—Your uppercase T truth. Renew their minds, renew their hearts, give them eyes to see, ears to hear.
Dr Ash Moreland: And Lord, I just thank You, thank You, thank You, thank You, thank You a million times over. In Your mighty name, we pray. Amen.
