You want to be well, but do you know how to get there? The western world of medicine has confused healing and made it about fixing. But healing has to be the goal. Learning to heal will teach you what medicine doesn’t know.
![learning to heal](https://thelivingwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/learning-to-heal-3-683x1024.jpg)
![learning to heal](https://thelivingwell.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/learning-to-heal-3-683x1024.jpg)
“Do I even want to be well?”
I found myself asking that question after years of treatment that helped me get better, but treatment I had become addicted to. Not by choice, although I don’t think anyone becomes addicted on purpose. But I honestly couldn’t live without it.
When I first got sick, I didn’t bat an eye. I would do whatever and whenever to feel better. I needed help, and lots of it. But after a year of weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) treatments, I started to recognize a pattern. Go to treatment, get patched together, live a day or two before the crumbling began, and I would limp myself back into treatment.
It felt like this had become my new way of life. Until one rainy spring day, as I was driving to another appointment, I started questioning if there was something I was missing. Was this what my life would amount to?
I loved what it had done for me but hated what it had created in me. Deep down, I knew I was missing something. Something that was bound to help me get over my hurdle of dependence and break into health.
It was the answer to my lingering question, did I even want to be well?
In asking this question, I learned healing was a choice more than a treatment. Inside this podcast, Dr. Ed Cohen shares a similar story journeying through learning to heal. If you’re struggling to heal, I encourage you to listen to this podcast that dives deeper into what it means to heal.
Learning to heal
The questioning didn’t stop. For weeks, I continued to ask myself if I wanted to be well. And if I did, why was it so difficult? What was I missing?
My entire career had been spent working to healthify the body, working to prevent myself from falling into the pit I had found myself. Everything I had worked for didn’t work. It only made me sick.
Now that I was here, I questioned what it would take to heal.
I needed the treatments. They saved my life, just as modern medicine has saved many lives. But if we’re not careful, we stop there, living for the bandaid while missing the solution. We miss the cure beyond the medication.
I don’t want to discount what modern medicine has done and will continue to do for humanity but to prove medicine can only help you to a point.
At some point, you have to choose to be well. Just like I had to choose to get well, and in the process, I had to shift my belief to understand I could thrive, illness or no illness.
Health was possible. It might look different than the traditional view of health I had believed in. But it could happen in correlation with treatments and medicine. Healing was possible.
The key, at least for me, was seeing healing in the way it was intended. Not as a place you arrive but through the action you take formed out of the belief that your body is designed to live well.
Your body was created to thrive
Your body is not the problem. It’s never a problem. Even if your body has problems, signs, symptoms, or disease processes, it doesn’t make it the problem. It’s just easy to make your body the scapegoat for more significant problems your body has been forced to carry.
But if you look a little closer, you can marvel at how it has protected you, even if that meant overriding your internal design to keep you alive. The body war you hate and give up almost anything to win is not your body against you, but it’s for you.
I had to learn the hard way that my own health crash was not because my body was at fault but because it didn’t have what it needed to thrive. It was simply trying to keep me alive.
When I thought I was doing everything right, I didn’t know that I was harming my body more than helping it.
I had believed the common health standard that forced me to follow the latest diet programs and exercise strategies while neglecting to pay attention to my body. But this external approach to health has never worked. It has only forced you deeper into the pit of frustration, making you feel like your body is against you based on the slew of symptoms it shows you. But symptoms aren’t the problem. They’re a sign that your body is out of balance.
When you regain that balance, working to support your body, you’ll find how marvelous your body is at healing what hurts it.
But your body was made to thrive. To feel vibrant, energized, whole and healthy. It was designed to heal. But it can only heal if you work to support it.
Healing happens through balance
Traditional medicine (not modern medicine) did a much better job at creating health even with fewer resources. Medicine was an art, seeing the body as individual rather than universal. Perhaps that is because we had fewer diagnostic tools, which forced the doctor to look at the patient. It forced us to see the body.
I wonder if we’ve lost the power to heal because we’ve neglected to see and understand the body. We’ve failed to understand what is happening inside your body and what you can do to help it. We’ve neglected to understand the homeostatic balance your body is working to achieve and the central thread of energy that runs through it all.
But balance was how medicine began. And balance is what you need to regain a sense of healing.
When I decided I was determined to heal, I put my trust in my body. I started to see my body not for the problems that continued to exist but for what it needed. I began to pay attention and learn what I could do to help regain a sense of balance outside of the treatments. Because that’s what my treatments were doing, that’s what all medicine should be doing, helping the body regain its homeostatic balance.
Healing is always about balance.
When I implemented practices of balance, I started to heal. I learned how to thrive. And it happened not because of what I did but because of what my body did.
forever healing
What I know about healing, it’s not a place you arrive. It’s not being free of disease. That might be a good goal, but the human body will always be aging on this side of eternity. Yet at the same time, the body is constantly healing when you’re thriving or just surviving.
Healing is an ongoing process in good times and hard times. But to heal, your body needs support.
It needs energy, nutrients, nourishment, rest, relationships, laughter, and space.
Your job is not to heal your body. Your job is to support it so that it can heal. Supporting your body begins by paying attention to it.
Where is your body starting from? Where is it falling out of balance? What does it need help with?
Pay attention, analyze, and commit to taking action. You must do something to support it, working to help it, not change it. In the process, so much will change.
This can easily fall so close to the standard way of healing that you miss it, but the traditional way generally states “to do for your body what it doesn’t know how to do. To change your body.” But that discounts the power your body has to heal.
The only tool you have to heal is the body. Everything else is supporting it no matter what type of medicine – western, eastern, or holistic – you use. Learning to heal means learning your body.
Healing is daily support. Healing is forever. How can you support that today?
Want to take the next steps in learning to heal?
Healing is not complicated. It’s simple. But it requires you to understand the intimate connection between the whole of who you are, mind, body, and soul. Take your health to the next level by understanding what it means to nourish your body and shift your metabolism, uplevel your hormones, and change the story about health so you can live it forever.
Inside Health Made Simple, you will get all the tools you need to create health without waiting. This 8-part course will revolutionize your health.
GET STARTED TODAY. LEARN MORE AND SIGN UP HERE.