This year our team is making big shifts to step more into our purpose to give you the tools and the power to help you dive deeper into healing yourself and feeling your best. Our new column, Unraveling, focuses on a new topic each month that we believe is important to address when you’re trying to navigate all the different stages of growth in your life. The purpose of this column is to help you drop the identity of all the negative programming and conditioning you’ve taken on throughout your life that’s negatively (and often silently) impacting your health and wellbeing on the physical, emotional and energetic layers of your body.
Push and pull.
Those words remind me of playing tug of war in kindergarten. It also reminds me of the intense energy exchange of two people fighting. And it makes me think of the heavy dark energy of a bully teasing a little child. What comes to mind for you? What comes up for me is the energy of people who suck the life out of you and push you to do things you don’t want to do or other people that pull you down emotionally and energetically. I could go on and on. I’m sure your brain has come up with a few visuals based on your past experiences where you’ve felt a push and pull or perhaps a pull then a push when you’re pulled in one direction and then pushed to do something you intuitively know you don’t want to do. We’ve all experienced this but most of the time when these situations happen, we can’t process what’s occurring on an energetic and emotional level because we’re too caught up in the emotional pain of what happened and how it made us feel.
We all feel the push or pull to unravel at some point. Maybe we hit rock bottom with our health or perhaps we’re going through a divorce or we just lost a special someone who was close to us and it forces us to wake up and start shedding the life that kept us shut down, alienated and unconscious. What I do know about unraveling is that in order for your body to manifest physical symptoms, it means that this did not “come out of nowhere”. The symptoms came from years and years and possibly decades of emotional and energetic wounding as well as a high body burden of toxins, which means that popping a pill quite possibly may stop your symptoms momentarily but that pill will not truly heal you. It’s not possible. To truly heal takes time and patience and I am living proof you can do it.
Now, let’s start to unravel a bit more this month, shall we?
Everything is Energy
Yes, everything is energy. At the very microscopic level of everything around you (all matter including this computer, your desk, the chair, etc.) is just energy. And emotions are simply just energy that comes over you and then dissipates or sometimes stays in you for days, weeks, years, etc. You can feel that – emotions either feel heavy or light and we’ve all experienced that.
Knowing this, you can start to see how every encounter with another person is an energy exchange and when you start to understand how others are draining you and how you’re giving your power away to them, you’ll start to realize how this heavy and dark energy is impacting your thought processes, your mood, your behaviors, your energy levels, your mindset and after time….your personality.
I know because I’ve been through many situations in my life that have wiped me out and torn me down. I was never bullied and wasn’t made fun of but I went through a lot of emotional and energetic abuse from people who loved me and since I did not have the coping skills or boundaries in place to support myself, I unconsciously let my personality and sense of self fizzle out and I was left depleted, numb and most of all traumatized. Interestingly enough, if you told me I had trauma in my life I would have laughed in your face. Me? Trauma? Heck no. I was a successful Manhattan woman supporting myself and running my own business…the idea of trauma was foreign to me.
Why We Need Boundaries to Be Healthy
Boundaries are like an invisible electric fence around our body to keep others from coming into our space and abusing us (trauma), to give us a sense of who we are and to keep us from going into the space of other people and abusing them (trauma).
We have INTERNAL + EXTERNAL boundaries. Our internal boundaries protect our behavior, our feelings, and our thinking while our external boundaries set a healthy distance from other people in our space.
Most of us are not taught boundaries, hence, we experience traumatic situations that leave us confused, shut down and scratching our heads and saying, “Why?”.
So, what does this have to do with our health?
A lot. And trust me, I wouldn’t have believed it years ago but now that I understand the emotional, the energetic and the physical layers of the body, I realize that you cannot heal from a health issue without addressing deeper layers beyond the physical (only eating clean, working out and taking supplements). It’s simply not possible to solely focus on the physical and expect healing to occur. We must go deeper into the emotional and energetic layers of the body.
We’re taught to go to a therapist for happiness, to a doctor for a checkup, to a yoga class or meditation class to relax, however, during my health crisis, I realized none of these things are connected in a way that actually helped me or my clients. No one was putting all the pieces together on the physical, emotional and energetic levels that I had discovered. Coming to this realization is what inspired me to create my own method, which allows you to work with all three layers of your body simultaneously. I have yet to find a book or doctor or practitioner who fully grasps the integration of these three layers for true health and healing to manifest as well as understands the connection between physical health issues, our past traumas and the energetics of our body and life (quantum physics).
This is why my office is flooded with patients who aren’t getting better despite doing everything “right” per their doctor’s instructions.
To me, boundaries enhance our ability to have a sense of self. They affect the impact our feelings, emotions, behavior of what we do and don’t do, how we attribute meaning to incoming data and what we look like to ourselves and other people.
If you do not have healthy boundaries for yourself you let people walk all over you or you may let people abuse you physically, emotionally or energetically. So, if we’re looking to dive deeper and understand our boundaries and how they affect our health, it’s a good question to ask ourselves, “Where do I stop and where do you start?” Ahhhh that’s something I went into great detail about and discussed in the Dear Amie audio feature here that you can listen to.
Trauma Is Probably Not What You Think
As mentioned above, if you’re anything like me it’s most likely that trauma is NOT what you think. At least it wasn’t what I thought. Before understanding the connection of the mind and the body, I thought trauma was going to war, getting physically abused by being thrown down a flight of steps or being held at gunpoint, which is why it took me until I was in my mid-30’s to realize that trauma was what was driving my chronic health issues because I had never been through a situation like that. Let’s just start by saying that I do not work with a therapist and I have not worked with a therapist to clear my trauma…therapy just is not my speed. Instead, I have worked with energy healers and Shamans to energetically release trauma from my mind, my sight, my body and more and it has been mind-blowing.
If you know me by now, you know I think outside the box and I don’t conform to what we’re “supposed” to be doing like going to a Western MD once a year or a therapist to talk about what’s going on… it just feels off to me and now I realize why. Therapy may work for you and that’s amazing but it doesn’t feel right to me so I urge you to listen to what feels best for you.
Unconsciously I knew if I tried talk therapy it may help a pinch but the idea of it didn’t feel right to me because I had an inkling what was going on inside of me was much, much deeper and was stored in my subconscious mind.
And once again, my intuition was right. This is why I created my next level of work, which encompasses the physical, emotional and energetic layers of the body because to be honest with you, if you have any type of chronic health issue, it’s not going to heal by only treating the physical with food and pills and green juices and supplements. Sure, that can help and yes that’s a part of the equation but it’s not the whole shebang.
How Trauma Impacts Your Health
What took me so long to realize on my 12-year chronic health journey was how the mind is controlling the body. This is not happening consciously, of course. This is happening unconsciously, which is why to heal the body means you have to get into the operating system of the mind, which is not found by consciously talking about your past.
Understanding this and diving into energy work throughout the last five years has profoundly changed my life, my body, my health and my overall outlook on life. I can honestly say I am a better woman for unraveling myself and getting to the core of why my body was shutting down instead of shoving a bunch of superfoods into my mouth and running to the gym to try to be “healthy”.
We all unravel at our own pace so be gentle with yourself as you peel back the layers of the onion that triggered your health issues. You can read my article, The Trigger That Pops Your Balloon, if you’d like more guidance. For now, start to let the idea that health issues do not form overnight (they take years, sometimes decades to manifest as physical symptoms) and to truly heal takes time and patience and I am living proof you can do it.
The views expressed in this article intend to share alternative treatments to bring about conversation and are for informational purposes only even if this article features advice from M.D’s and medical practitioners. This featured article is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, treatment or diagnosis and should never be used for specific medical advice.
