Healing wasn’t a part of my plan. My goal in nutrition was to prevent anything that would require healing by preventing disease and injury. I believed I could control myself from needing to heal by living healthy forever, not knowing that health is a daily healing, not the prevention of it.
When I crashed, I was forced into healing. The only other option was to live stuck in my illness.
Before getting sick, I had spent so much time trying to prevent health problems by securing the arrival at a destination I thought would bring me permanent health that I completely misunderstood what it meant to live healthy. Health is not the absence of disease or injury (although limiting this is ideal). It’s not the prevention of a place that requires healing.
Health is learning how to heal.
It’s daily action that supports healing. And when you learn to heal and practice healing, your body will become far healthier.
But getting there means changing your view of what healing means. It’s changing your view of what health means. Moving away from the external chase and into the internal healing by building a new story of health that leans into daily healing.
Inside the first podcast in this eight-part series called How You Heal, I help you understand the story your current life revolves around and how that is changing your biology. In the process, you will learn to shift that story, opening up to an internal approach to healing.
How To Heal: Seeing the Whole Picture
The body has singlehandedly taken over the spotlight of healing. It has become the scapegoat for our problems, wishes, and desires. It’s even become the fulfillment of human desire changing how we think we’ll be loved, seen, and known.
Of course, the body matters, but when we put so much emphasis on the body, we misunderstand how our biology works and why it works. Your body is never acting alone. It’s working in harmony with your mind and soul. They may be different, even separate, but they’re connected.
Within this connection, your body, mind, and soul constantly communicate. What communication each sends determines how they function.
Energy (or emotion) is the vehicle running through all three. Think of yourself as the lightbulb. How that bulb glows, or the light portrayed, is determined based on the energy flowing through the three specific wires that work together to illuminate the bulb – the ground (body), neutral (mind), and power (soul).
If any wires are disconnected or not working correctly, the energy can’t flow, and the bulb dims. And it’s not because the energy isn’t there. It is. It’s because the wires are disconnected or out of balance, preventing the energy from flowing.
You have the energy you need. Healing requires you to open up the flow, which means supporting the movement of energy within the mind, body, and soul. It’s learning how to mobilize energy, and learning this can change everything about your life.
How To Heal: Inward Approach
The common approach to health has been to healthify your body, leaving you neglecting your mind and soul for how you look. But your body is just reacting to the internal workings of your whole. Getting healthy without all three creates a temporary substitution if you consider it one at all.
Ironically, trying to healthify your body while neglecting your mind and soul has left you with only one option, look for solutions from outside sources. Instead of looking within or relying on any form of self-awareness, the world has taught you to neglect your needs or what your body is trying to say to follow an external plan or system.
No matter how well-researched these plans are (and most have great research), it’s hard to compute why the majority never work. Because, as research proves, they should. But they don’t because they leave you neglecting your body for an external plan. In the process, you channel all of your energy into an outside source and away from what is required to heal – your body.
Essentially, you’ve disconnected the wires while still expecting your whole to glow.
Reconnect the Wires
If you pay attention, you’ll realize that no matter how much energy you shift to this external focus, you still have an internal war raging on. We have separated this war from a biological problem, turning it into a psychological one.
Not only are your hormones messed up and your weight a problem, but you also have a problem with your cravings, willpower, and discipline. Or lack thereof.
To simplify things, we’ve separated one problem into two that feel easier to control. You struggle with problems inside your body, and now your mind is a problem. This forces you to double the work. Not only do you have to figure out how to get healthy, but you also have to worry about thinking healthy.
No wonder people are overwhelmed and confused.
Of course, your mind and body are separate, but they’re interconnected. One depends on the other. The component linking them all together is energy or emotion (energy in motion). Energy is the communication that runs throughout your whole, determining how you feel and what you experience.
But understanding energy means understanding how you feel, and this is really the problem.
Because people don’t like to feel emotions, especially uncomfortable ones, and you can’t feel the good emotions without the hard ones. This creates the predicament we find most people living in, working to ignore, suppress, or escape emotion.
Arguably, this is why we’ve become so fixated on finding external things to heal us because we really don’t want to do the work that it takes to heal. We don’t want to confront the deepest parts of ourselves and feel the things that will help us feel everything. We especially won’t if our body feels unsafe and threatened.
Preventing and avoiding pain is one of your deepest survival responses. One that becomes much more active the more unsafe you feel. This means you really won’t be able to do the work until you can regain a sense of internal safety.
How To Heal: Traps + Medicators
In preventing pain, your body goes to work to subconsciously put into place traps to avoid pain. During trauma or pain, these are essential to your survival. But what once helped you survive can become incredibly dysfunctional long-term—leaving you running from something that no longer exists. Ultimately this prevents you from living.
Understanding and even appreciating these traps can help you become aware of what you’re still doing, keeping you stuck in a place you want to escape.
Common traps include:
- Disassociation (Self-abandonment)
- Self-Sabotage
- Perfectionism
- Confusion (analysis-paralysis)
- Hyper-Independence (I can do it all)
- Overworking
The purpose of these may have once been for survival, but it can become the thing preventing you from succeeding. In a way, that was their purpose. To help you stay alive, not to thrive.
On the flip side, when the energy and emotion fight to come out (and they will), you’ll have to face it. That doesn’t mean you’ll have to re-live it (rarely you do, nor should you). But you’ll be faced with the discomfort and even the pain. When you don’t have the tools to find safety within the pain, you’ll put into place the bandaid, leaving you to mask it with medicators.
Medicators numb, mask, or shove the emotions back inside so you can maintain the status quo.
Common medicators include:
- Food
- Addictions (Drugs, Work, Porn, Alcohol, etc.)
- Busyness
- Denial
- Alcohol
- Self-Denial
At one time, medicators and traps may have protected you and served a purpose. But often, they are why you are stuck repeating old patterns and cycles.
Healing is scary and overwhelming, but it changes the course of your life because it removes these medications and traps from being a necessity. But getting there means moving deeper, reconnecting to your whole, and doing the work to heal.
How to Heal: Internal Approach
Healing requires you to start from the source of energy, your soul, and reconnect your mind and body. Healing is working with the interdependence and interconnectedness of all three and creating balance within.
Of course, it will be challenging because it’s different. It might make you scared. But it’s not intended to retraumatize you but to free you from the trauma that you currently allow to drive your life. More than anything, healing is a daily process of regaining balance. It’s an opening up, receiving, letting go, softening, moving, doing, connecting, and living.
Healing means coming home to take up residence within your being. It’s an act of self-awareness that is founded on self-love. In the process, this creates an internal balance in your mind, body, and soul, producing internal safety.
What I love most about this work is that nothing in your external environment needs to change for you to change. It possibly should and overtime will. But regardless of what is happening in your life or our world, you are not bound to it but can heal regardless of it.
Healing is not what happens or has happened to you but what you do with it. Every day the world will give you a reason that requires healing, making healing a daily act of health—a daily act of showing up and creating balance from the inside out.
Tools that Heal:
Inside this podcast and throughout the eight-part series, I will share with you tools that heal. Tools that you can implement to create healing in your mind, body, and soul.
Your body matters, and we talk a lot about what it looks like to create health, but this summer, I want to dive into the deeper parts. The parts you’re living out of, no matter how much you try to avoid them. I will help free you from what is holding you back so you can live fully in the intended design God created with you.
So you can live out his dominion and his purpose for your life. The powerful, abundant life God created you for and for His Glory.
Start Here:
The best place to start is where you currently are. It’s easy to neglect your current story chasing a better one. But the only way to live a better story is to shift the current one requiring you to understand your current story.
One of the more powerful examples of my current story happened with my counselor during a therapy session. She showed me a picture of an infinity loop. The infinity loop represents my life. Every decision, action, and outcome flows together, creating the story of my life. But there is generally one thing all decisions flow around: what is inside the infinity loop.
Your life, decisions, and actions flow around and out of something. A belief, a trauma, a situation, and that situation, no matter how deep you’ve buried it, helps you determine every decision and action you take.
Understanding what’s inside your infinity loop and replacing it with something better changes your decisions, actions, and outcome.
Over at The Weekly Fill Newsletter, I share how to understand what’s inside your infinity loop so you can change it. Check it out right here and start taking action.
A Few More Things You Might Like
I’m just revealing the tip of the iceberg with this podcast. There are seven more to come that walk you through the process of healing and regaining the connection in your mind, body, and soul. Follow along to learn tools to heal!
Check out these additional resources to help you heal:
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