Six Steps to Restoring Health
Healing is like a three leg stool. We must have all three in order to feel healthy and have a strong foundation to build on. Mental, physical and emotional/spiritual.
Physical: While they all overlap and are intrinsically intertwined for this analogy our physical leg addresses how we treat heal our tangible body. We do this through nutrition, exercise and other physical modalities.
Emotional/Spiritual: The emotional/spiritual addresses more our subconscious or deeply engrained beliefs and feelings we have towards ourselves. This is where meditation, hypnotherapy and other trauma therapies come into play.
Mind: Our third leg addresses the mind. This includes our conscious thoughts and beliefs, knowledge and how we cognitively process our experiences.
I have outlined 6 steps to address all three areas we need to build our foundation of health and nurture our own natural healing abilities.
1. Reset Autonomic Nervous System
Our bodies are naturally designed to automatically respond to our environment to address the physical demands it faces. Stressed, scared or worried? Historically this typically was due to physical dangers and prepared the body to fight or flee the situation, flooding the blood with cortisol insulin and glucose preparing the muscular system to be on high alert and have fuel and energy to do its job. At the same time powering down the digestive system, immune system and others that are less vital to survival in that moment. This is exactly what we need in the short term to survive.
However, continuous worry and stress can make us chronically in this sympathetic nervous system state where those other systems are regularly slowed or shut down. We then have week immunity, high blood sugar, poor digestion, bad sleep and eventually we get insulin resistant and cortisol resistance making us both constantly hungry and tired at the same time. Sometimes our bodies can get so habituated to this state that it no longer knows how to turn off.
Through various methods we can switch this system back into a relaxed state being able to go back and forth between the sympathetic and parasympathetic responses naturally and appropriately. Methods such as vagal toning, neural or brain rewiring through deep state suggestive meditations, nutrition, circadian balancing and more.
2. Rewire Trauma and Negative Beliefs
This is also related to the nervous system but because its a very specific issue I want to address it separately. When someone experiences trauma their body is in a very heightened physical and emotional state. Due to this heightened state our bodies and minds also have heightened memories of these events in an attempt to make sure it doesn't happen again or if it does be better prepared for it. These memories are so deeply rooted that becomes part of our brain wiring.
Until about the age of 7 children's brains remain in a constant slow wave brain state, Delta that increases their ability to learn rapidly. While this is highly useful to a developing child unfortunately along with it comes learning ideas about who we are and how we fit in the world. If we have negative childhood experiences this becomes part of our natural brain wiring and a very rooted subconscious belief system we take into adulthood. Ideas such as, I'm a bad kid, I need to stay out of the way, or I will never be enough.
Just doing affirmations to try to remove these traumas or subconscious belief systems will not be enough to remove these beliefs or feelings wired into our brains and nervous system. It takes going back into the beta brain wave states and releasing and rewiring these rooted emotions and experiences.
If you want to know more on these topics I suggest reading The Body Keeps The Score and The Biology of Belief, two fantastic books available on Amazon (click the title to order).
3. Find Meaning and Purpose
When you don't feel like you have a purpose to your life or find meaning in your relationships or other areas of your life, you can feel very lost, unmotivated and as though you are wandering aimlessly. Finding meaning to life can be difficult for many but especially for those who have been chronically ill or experienced trauma. Healing is like a three leg stool. Addressing our mental portion of our stool going through exercises to find your purpose and meaning in your life is crucial to your healing.
4. Heal the Gastrointestinal System
Antibiotics, 88k food additives, pesticides, herbicides, steroids and other medications changes to the nature of our food (hybridization, GMO, cross breeding, unnatural animal feeds and hormones, etc...) and stress all damage our digestive system. There is a mucus layer and under that a one cell thick layer between our internal system and the outside world.
When we damage those layers, and we very much do, bacteria, viruses, undigested food particles, all the pesticides and chemicals that we would normally eliminate now can get through this damaged layer into our blood bombarding our immune systems. Some of these chemicals and particles s are so foreign it causes a huge immune response. Or some things such as heavy metals get embedded into our tissues causes all kinds of problems, Chronic inflammation, autoimmune disease, metal health disorders, fatigue, hormone imbalances and more. Usually food sensitivities are not there because the foods are bad (although some of them are) its because our guts are damaged
Understanding how our digestive systems function is crucial to knowing how to heal it. I always put my clients through an elimination diet to relieve the body of the constant stress and inflammation and then work on healing the gut. This is not intended to be a permanent diet but a way to allow the body to heal as well as know exactly how your body responds to what foods.
5. Restore Nutrition
Divining into the world of nutrition can be unbelievably confusing. There are so many contradicting opinions. If you followed all of them the only thing you could safely consume is fresh water from a mountain stream no where near civilization. My goal is to help you not fear food, but to understand it and learn to eat according to nature. The vast majority of what is wrong with food today is what humans have done to it. As I stated before, If we react to natural and healthy foods, its not because the food is inherently bad, its because we've damaged our digestive systems.
Our bodies have around 37 billion, trillion chemical reactions in our bodes every second. That's like have a 68 trillion checks handed to you all written for 68 billion dollars. Its hard to conceive. Each reaction takes vitamins, minerals, enzymes or other nutrients in order for them to occur. If we don't have enough nutrients, we don't run optimally, to say the least. What we eat determines how our bodies operates.
6. Remove Toxic Buildup
It is estimated that humans consume two to five pounds of food additives, one to two gallons of pesticides and 17 credit card sized pieces of plastic a year. Due to industrial practices our air is heavily polluted, our water is contaminated and our soil is stripped of nutrients and full of toxins and heavy metals. We lather our bodies in chemical laden soaps, lotions and beauty product as well as over sanitize everything with more chemicals. Many of these particles do not leave our bodies, especially those with certain genes such as MTHFR, NFE2L2, and Cytochrome P450 can hinder our ability to get rid of these molecules. There is a lot of research correlating these genes to significant health issues such as cancer, depression, Parkinson's and more. Stress also down regulates our ability to detoxify. Not only do we need to learn how to avoid these toxins but how to support our bodies to remove what is trapped inside of our tissues.
Set up a free consultation with me to see how you can get start on your healing process today! Click to schedule