Six Steps to Restoring Health
In order to fully heal and come to a place where we truly love life and are full of joy and abundance, we need to have a three-system approach. We must work in all three areas in order to 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 and 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 to foster and support our own natural healing abilities.
1. Reset & De-Stress the Nervous System
Our bodies are naturally designed to automatically respond to our environment, adapting to the immediate 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 fight or flee. At the same time it powers 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 puts us chronically in a sympathetic nervous system state, continuously keeps the other important body systems downregulated or turned off. We then have weak immunity, high blood sugar, and poor digestion, which can turn into malnourishment (which can result in a host of other problems). We will also likely have bad sleep, and eventually, we get insulin resistance 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 include vagal toning, neural or brain rewiring through deep state suggestive meditations, nutrition, circadian balancing, and more.
2. Restore Nutrition
Diving 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 thousands of miles away from 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. If you react to natural and healthy foods, it's not because the food is inherently bad; it's either because of what we've done to it, we've damaged our digestive systems, or our immune system is dysregulated.
Our bodies have around 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second. That's like having 68 trillion checks handed to you, all written for 68 billion dollars. It's hard to conceive. Each reaction takes vitamins, minerals, enzymes, or other micronutrients in order for them to occur. If we don't have enough nutrients, we don't run optimally. What we eat determines how our bodies operate.
3. Rewire Trauma and Subconscious Beliefs
This is also related to the nervous system, but because it's 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 they become part of our emotional response and neurological wiring.
Until about the age of 7, children's brains remain in a constant slow-wave brain state called Delta, which increases a child's ability to learn rapidly. 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 systems. 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).
4. Find Meaning and Purpose
When you don't feel like you have a purpose in your life or find meaning in your relationships or goals, you can feel very lost, unmotivated, and as though you are wandering aimlessly. Finding meaning in life can be difficult for many, but especially for those who have been chronically ill, neglected, or have experienced trauma. Every person has been created for a purpose and has deep intrinsic value and endless potential. I will help guide you to find the things that inspire you and fill you with excitement, joy, and light, bringing purpose and meaning back into your life.
5. Heal the Gastrointestinal System
Antibiotics, 88k food additives, pesticides, herbicides, steroids, medications, and stress, along with other changes to the nature of our food (hybridization, GMO, cross breeding, unnatural animal feeds, hormones, etc.) all take a toll on our digestive system. With a constant barrage of chemicals and foreign particles hitting our digestive system it's a wonder it works at all. Most of these have been introduced into our food system and environments within the last 100 years, and evolution has not been able to keep up to be able to process the daunting amounts of toxins.
In our digestive tract, there is a thin mucus layer, and under that is a one-cell-wall-thick layer between our internal system and everything we put into our mouth. When we damage those layers, bacteria, viruses, undigested food particles, and all the pesticides and chemicals we would normally eliminate through waste can now get through into the bloodstream. Our system is then bombarded with unprecedented amounts of these chemicals and particles. These are foreign to our system and can cause a host of issues, including inflammation or an autoimmune response. Some things, such as heavy metals, get embedded into our tissues and cause fatigue, hormonal disruption, autoimmune disease, mental health disorders, and more. Again, usually, food sensitivities are not there because the foods are bad (although some of them are); it's 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 certain foods.
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 every 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 products as well as oversanitize 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, which 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 so many more. To make matters worse, stress also down-regulates our ability to detoxify. Not only do we need to learn how to avoid these toxins but also 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 started on your healing process today! Click to schedule