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The Healing Glossary

This glossary was created to help you go deeper into your healing by giving you the tools and definitions of the words, phrases and concepts we use throughout our work. This is a place you can come back to throughout your journey to discover new articles and features that you may not have understood the meaning behind before.

PHYSICAL LAYER // the foundation

• The Trigger that Pops Your Balloon – Something always triggers something in the body to react. Either it’s the pollen outside that’s causing you to get allergies or a parasite that you got from drinking a raw green juice that caused your autoimmune issues, or a really intense, angry parent who made you cry and have breakdowns as a child. We all have triggers. We’re just not quiet enough with ourselves to actually sit back and think, “Hey, what caused this?” Let Amie give you her honest answer about what she refers to as ‘Your Balloon” in a way that makes you understand ‘healing’ as simply as possible: “Think of your life and your body as a balloon. A big, blown up balloon. Throughout your life, you hit bumps, you have heartbreaks, you lose people you love, you catch colds, you may eat a certain food that gives you a parasite, you deal with traumas, etc. All of these things press up against the balloon and there are some people who have been sailing along their whole life and their balloon has been pressed here and there – sometimes pressed harder than other times, but their balloon doesn’t pop. Or perhaps it pops when they’re 50 or 60 years old in the form of a health issue. For the rest of us, something….some trauma, some food, some parasite, some accident, some breakup, some heartbreak, some traumatic moment pops our balloon. For me, it was her college breakup. I had no idea that my college breakup shut me completely off until 6 months ago. I was on a date with a lovely man who was telling me about his sister who had just gone through years of health issues and I asked what the trigger was and he said, ‘A breakup with a man she loved.’ BOOM. I almost couldn’t talk. ‘OMG’, I said to myself. That was it. Wow. Your mind is blown, right?”
• The Nervous System – Think of your nervous system like an antenna that picks up on subtle signals around you that you can’t see but you can feel. People who have chronic health issues are dealing with a collapsed nervous system, which needs to be addressed in order for the body to heal and repair itself.
• Fight, Flight, or Freeze Mode – This is the mode (fight-or-flight) of the nervous system that is also referred to as the Sympathetic Nervous System, which is where most of us live these days in our fast-paced go go go lifestyle that revs up our adrenaline and cortisol. This is the mode you should be in only if you are running from a tiger or dodging a truck coming at you. It should not be where you’re living day in and day out. Your body cannot heal when you are in this mode so you can do the math here as to why most people do not heal; it’s because they’re trying to heal when they are stuck here and they must get out of this mode to heal.
• Rest and Relaxation Mode – This is the mode of the nervous system that is also referred to as the Parasympathetic Nervous System, which is the mode you should be in when you’re sleeping and eating and repairing your body. This is the mode your body must be in order to heal.
• The Limbic System – This is the emotional center of the brain, which must be addressed for true healing to take place.
• Neuroscience – This is a form of science that deals with the function of the nervous system. We now know we can rewire the brain through neuroplasticity, which is what Amie used to heal herself and what she uses to help my clients heal themselves, as well.
• Detoxification – Our bodies were built to deal with natural pollution created by digestion, respiration, and metabolism, but they’re not designed to handle the enormous amount of artificial pollutants we’re exposed to in today’s chemical-filled world. The only way to deal with this toxic overload is to assist the body’s natural self-cleansing mechanisms with detoxing. Amie’s best-selling cookbook, Eating Clean, is a great resource to start detoxing toxins from your lifestyle.
• Epigenetics – epigenetics, which says that it is NOT your genes that determine what happens with your health, it’s about your environment! This means you have more power than you think because if you can remove the toxicity from your mind, your tap water, your food and other places in your lifestyle such as your beauty products and your personal care products, you have the power over your genes. Your genes do not determine your life! Dr. Bruce Lipton, MD, has an incredible book, The Biology of Belief, which Amie wrote about and he discusses how he discovered this fascinating research in his laboratory.
• Inflammation – Inflammation is very common topic these days because it’s the root cause of unwanted symptoms and health issues. When our immune system is imbalanced, inflammation can lead to chronic health issues. Inflammation can be caused by stress, mold, pesticides, mercury, hidden parasites, bacteria and viruses as well as by eating an inflammatory diet filled with table salt, sugar, white flours, refined vegetable oils and processed foods, all of which lack nutrients that our body needs on a daily basis to function optimally. Amie’s best-selling cookbook, Eating Clean, is a great resource to start detoxing toxins from your lifestyle.
• Mitochondria – These are the little worker bees in your body that keep you functioning. Mitochondria production is key for anyone going through a chronic health issue.
• EMFs – We are exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from just about everything these days (our phones, our computers, our microwave, cell phone towers, wi-fi, etc.) and just because we cannot see these frequencies doesn’t mean they’re not negatively affecting our health.
• Toxins – Toxins may seem harmless in small amounts, especially when you don’t have an overt reaction. But they’re sneaky—they can lie dormant for years, accumulating in our bodies and eventually overwhelming the liver to cause inflammation, which then leads to disease. Inflammation can occur anywhere in the body where toxins exist. If it exists in the joints, then you may get arthritis. If toxins are harbored in the colon, you may get colitis. Amie’s feature on Body Burden from Toxins is important to read to understand the levels of toxicity in our environment. Amie’s best-selling cookbook, Eating Clean, is a great resource to start detoxing toxins from your lifestyle.
• Herxing (A Healing Crisis)– This is also known as ‘die-off’ symptoms when your symptoms get worse before they get better and it’s a sign you’re healing. This happens when the patient is trying to remove heavy metals or candida (yeast) or some other toxic material from their body and their liver cannot handle the process of removing toxins fast enough; therefore the patient ends up with flu-like symptoms that can last days until the liver is supported appropriately. This is a very scary process and Amie went through years of die-off with biofilm, heavy metals, mold, Lyme disease and more and trust us, it is not a pretty picture.
• Healing – For true healing to take place, the patient must focus on the physical, emotional and energetic layers of the body. After years of focusing solely on food and alternative treatments such as infrared saunas, coffee enemas and more, Amie realized that she was missing a crucial step that she needed to address if she really wanted to heal and feel better and that’s exactly why she introduced the emotional and energetic layers to her work to help her clients heal.
• Conventional (Western) Medicine – This is a form of medicine that some people refer to as allopathic medicine and it focuses mainly on ‘fixing’ the body with Band-Aid approaches such as pills and creams (think dermatologist and gastroenterologists). This form of medicine is WONDERFUL for when someone breaks an arm or gets in a car crash or is having a heart attack. However, while it seems to excel with these acute issues, it fails in chronic health issues because conventional medicine doctors lack the knowledge to actually heal the body. This form of medicine saved Amie’s life many times with c.diff colitis and put her on steroids when she had myositis, which was very helpful at the time; however, it did not know how to heal her body, and the antibiotics and steroids and water pills she was put on made her conditions much worse by kicking up yeast (candida) and mold in her gut leaving her with something called Hairy Tongue, which is when your tongue turns black from too much mold in your gut from numerous antibiotics and steroids.
• Functional Medicine – This is a form of alternative medicine that looks beyond Western medicine blood work and basic testing. This form of medicine is meant to help the patient understand the underlying causes that are manifesting as physical symptoms. Amie has worked with many Functional M.D.s who she believes in such as Mark Hyman, M.D., Susan Blum, M.D., and Jeffrey Morrison, M.D., amongst others. Amie’s best-selling cookbook, Eating Clean, is a great resource to start detoxing toxins from your lifestyle. Here is a list of our favorite Functional Doctors in New York.
• Integrative Medicine – Unlike Western medical doctors who follow a disease model (seeking the problem in one area of the body), integrative doctors want the whole picture and they also include forms of energy work (energy medicine) to heal the body at the root cause. Amie’s best-selling cookbook, Eating Clean, is a great resource to start detoxing toxins from your lifestyle. Find an Integrative or Functional Doctor in your area.
• Survival of the Fittest – Our society is all about the no pain, no gain and rewards us for pushing ourselves with everything we do and it seems like this outdated model of survival of the fittest is doing nothing but making everyone stressed out, anxious and feeling like they’re not enough, which affects our health on the physical, emotional and energetic layers. This is a big reason so many people see symptoms pop up ‘out of nowhere’ because they’ve been pushing themselves for decades and they’re like a ticking time bomb so it’s not long before the underlying symptoms just need one little thing to occur (food poisoning, verbal abuse, dealing with a negative colleague, etc.) before the physical symptoms manifest as a chronic health issue.
• Survival of the Nurtured – This is what we all longed for as children, isn’t it? Unfortunately, we were brought up with shame, guilt, and many other painful emotions even if we were a part of the ‘perfect’ family. We cannot go back into the past and turn back time to change anything but what we can do is heal our past by rewiring our brain through neuroplasticity, which Amie describes. We don’t have to hold onto these painful emotions and push ourselves like ‘survival of the fittest’ as mentioned above. To truly heal, we must nurture ourselves so that our bodies can relax and get out of the fight, flight or freeze mode and heal. A nurtured childhood is what we craved as children because a lot of our subconscious pain and memories were from not being nurtured. And yes, everything is connected; the emotional pain you feel in your body when you think of a past painful memory proves that to you. Healing that pain is the name of the game.
• Nourishment – As Amie mentions in her best-selling book, Eating Clean, foods have so much more to them than calories, and yet many people think the caloric intake is the bottom line. Au contraire, my friend! The number of calories a food has is merely information, and as with any other kind of information, less isn’t necessarily better, just as more isn’t necessarily bad. A 100-calorie snack pack is in no way equal to 100 calories of an avocado. Counting calories is the last thing you should worry about when you’re trying to eat clean. A handful of nuts may be calorically dense, but there’s a lot of goodness packed in there you can’t get somewhere else. Choose foods based on how they nourish every cell in your body, rather than by how many calories you believe they will glue to your waistline. When you’re eating clean, believe it or not, those calories don’t add up to love handles and saddlebags.
• Clean Eating – Food in its whole form is the healthiest version. That’s our rule of thumb, and it should be yours. The majority of what you eat should have one ingredient. What’s in cabbage? Cabbage. What’s in an orange? An orange. If most of your meals come from a box, then it’s worth rethinking your diet.

  Because we live in the twenty-first century, we get that there are a fair amount of packaged convenience foods you probably won’t cut completely out of your life. If the only way to know what you’re eating is to read about it on the side of the package, though, you are, as Amie always says, eating sawdust. The more a food is processed, the less of its original nutrition remains. Sure, some foods need to be heated to make them palatable and to ease digestion, but we’d rather you do more of the processing yourself, be it heating, blending, or chopping, and leave less of it to manufacturers. More information about clean eating is in Amie’s best-selling cookbook, Eating Clean, which is a great resource to start eating clean. C

• Organic Food – When looking for organic produce, look for the #9 on the sticker to confirm the fruit or vegetable is organic. When looking at other food products and lettuce, look for the USDA certified seal to confirm the food is organic. More information about the organic food farming process HERE.

EMOTIONAL LAYER // the clearing

• Subconscious Mind – This part of your mind stores and retrieves data based on your past experiences, which have programmed you to do the things you do unconsciously. You can’t necessarily ‘see’ what’s in your subconscious mind because it’s hidden from your conscious mind and was developed from ages 0-7. Think of this part of your mind as what’s keeping you in your own way when you feel stuck and you’re scratching your head, “why?”. The unconscious mind communicates with the conscious mind through the subconscious and it provides us with meaning to every interaction we have with the world as filtered through the lens of our beliefs and habits. It communicates through dreams, emotions, imagination, sensations, and feelings. Things that the conscious mind wants to keep hidden from awareness are repressed in the unconscious mind. Whatever is in the unconscious mind is only available to the conscious mind in disguised form.
• Conscious Mind – This part of your mind that you’re conscious of all day long while you are living your life. It consists of everything inside of our awareness. It’s the part of us that we can talk about in a rational way. Doing a math problem is a great example of using your conscious mind. Or having a conversation is another great example. However, if you are driving a car and having a conversation at the same time, your conscious mind is having the conversation while your subconscious mind is driving the car!
• Limiting Beliefs – A false belief that we acquire as a result of making a conclusion about something that is not correct. It’s just a belief. It’s not true or false. It just is. The belief that all thin women are beautiful is not true, it’s just a belief you have that someone installed into your brain through movies, advertisements, friends, colleagues, and these beliefs end up negatively affecting our life. In this case, having that limited belief that only thin women are beautiful is what led me to have an eating disorder. I was unconscious to not even realizing that it was just a belief and it was not true, yet it had a huge impact on my overall health and life. Limiting beliefs are often about ourselves and our identity. We can change our negative beliefs by working with the subconscious mind, which is where our beliefs are stored.
• Beliefs – How you perceive your experiences is based on what you believe. Eight people could see the same event take place and be in the same spot at the same time and they would all have a different perception of what happened and they would all have a different reaction to what happened. The reason for this is because they have different beliefs based on their past experiences and what beliefs are lurking in their subconscious mind that they cannot see. Your beliefs create you to act a certain way every day so it’s helpful to start looking at why you do the things you do and why you feel the way you feel around certain people, situations, etc.
• Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) – These people absorb other people’s emotions. Amie is an HSP. Most HSP’s can walk into a room and sense the moods of people immediately. It’s like we have extra sensitive antennas on our bodies that pick up on subtle frequencies that other people who are not sensitive cannot feel or pick up on. This can have a tremendous effect on your health, which is what Amie discusses with the Energetic Layer of the body.
• Empath – Someone with a strong ability to feel the thoughts, emotions, and energy of others very easily. Amie is a highly sensitive empath, just like many of her clients. Many people, women especially take on the pain and emotions and energy of others and it affects them on a physical layer, manifesting as physical symptoms. This can have a tremendous effect on your health, which is what Amie discusses with the Energetic Layer of the body.
• Trauma – A deeply disturbing experience and anything that your nervous system registers as a threat. Trauma gets lodged in the body and can manifest as physical symptoms, which is why trauma is a huge part of Amie’s work, where we address how to rewire the brain through neuroscience and heal ourselves by healing our traumatized minds and body from our past. This is what it means to truly heal yourself. The mind can hurt just as much as the body can so addressing trauma is key for health to take place.
• Consciousness – The state or quality of awareness of being aware of something within yourself. Being aware of what’s going on in your mind as your brain brings the information to you and being aware of the experiences you’re having as a result. If you are not aware of this, your choices will be driven by the oldest areas of your brain which is to fight/flight/eat/reproduce! When people start to become conscious they start to see how they’ve been in a trance-like state for the majority of their life running on programs that were installed into them by teachers, parents, movies, TV, etc. For example, when you become conscious, you can see all the ways you numbed yourself out with food or alcohol or drugs and at the time you didn’t even realize what you were doing but now that you’re conscious of it, you can see and probably can’t believe what a trance-like state you were in for decades without realizing it and unconsciously reacting to everything around you or being triggered by other people when it has nothing to do with them but everything to do with why what they’re doing bothers you.
• Unconscious Behavior + Actions – When you’re unconscious to your behavior and your actions, you have no filter and you could just do things such as yell, scream, fight, etc without pausing to become conscious of what’s going on in your mind before you lash out. This is an unconscious behavior. Other unconscious behaviors as noted above are people who have addictions and they can’t see what’s going on but everyone around them can see that they’re addicted to certain things. This could be an addiction to TV, junk food, alcohol, cigarettes, etc…the list goes on and on. The issue is that there’s something unconscious going on that the person is not aware of and so instead they resort to numbing behaviors to keep themselves from actually feeling anything.
• Victim Mentality – When someone recognizes themselves as the victim of the negative actions of others in a situation and by doing so, it causes self-harm unto themselves and others around them. We all know someone who plays the victim “poor me” etc.
• Disassociation – When someone disconnects from their body, their thoughts, and their feelings. It’s a loss of identity of sorts and Amie went through this after traumatizing experiences that shut her down emotionally, physically and energetically. At the time when she was disassociated from herself, Amie clearly could not see this because she was in her own way and in a trauma trance just trying to survive while her body and her brain were stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode. All of Amie’s clients have experienced disassociation of some sort from their body because when you go through a chronic health issue and you’re in so much pain and so confused about what doctors to believe and what to do, you cannot cope and so you disassociate from your body and resort to not feeling and numbing yourself out.
• Charged Triggers – These trigger past trauma. The only reason someone reacts to you and the only reason you react to someone else or something else instead of responding is because this situation triggered a past emotional wound for you that you haven’t dealt with and so you’re triggered and you react, which may look like yelling or losing your temper or fighting etc.
• Limitations + Barriers – These are the blocks you have in your life that are put there by you unconsciously and they keep you “safe”, stuck and in your own way. Read our series Why Staying Safe Makes You Feel Stuck & How to Move Forward.
• Comfort Zone – This is an imaginary zone that we create inside our heads and we believe (and have a limiting belief) that we cannot go out of this zone because we fear what’s outside of it. This zone is nothing but an illusion inside of our heads based on our limiting beliefs, traumas, fears and more.
• Fear – Fear is nothing but an illusion, as well, which we discussed in Why Staying Safe Makes You Feel Stuck and How to Move Forward. Fear is an unpleasant emotion that is created by a belief that something is scary or a threat or dangerous. Fear keeps us stuck and in our own way whether it’s being fearful about dating after a chronic illness, fearful of flying an airplane, fearful of getting a promotion, etc.
• Self-Destruction – Behavior that is harmful to the person who engages in the behavior.
• Self-Loathing (Self-hatred) – The underlying feeling that we are not good at this or that, not good enough such as when we compare ourselves to others and find fault with ourselves or the harsh inner critic that we listen to in our voice.
• Self-Doubt – Lack of confidence in yourself and what you can do.
• Negative Spiral – When one isolated incident triggers a spiral of negative thoughts. It is often a symptom of anxiety and/or depression but happens to many of us every so often.
• Reticular Activating System – Filters out unnecessary information so the important information gets through. It takes what you focus on and creates a filter for it, which means you see only what you want to see in situations because it seeks information that validates your beliefs!
• Anxiety – Excessive worry, fear, apprehension, and nervousness.
• React vs. Respond – Reacting happens when your conscious mind doesn’t have the awareness to be conscious of the situation so you react unconsciously. When you respond, on the other hand, you pause and allow your conscious mind to take a step back and look at the big picture and instead of reacting, you gently respond in a more conscious manner.
• Emotions – A state of mind that manifests from your mood, situations in your life and your beliefs.
• Feelings – Read How to Feel Your Feelings.
• Intuition– Read How to Trust Yourself and also Intuition. 
• Worthiness – Believing that you are enough and that you deserve respect. There are no conditions attached to worthiness– it is unconditional.
• Self-Compassion – Being compassionate and warm to yourself when you’re experiencing discomfort, pain and unpleasant situations instead of beating yourself up with self-criticism.
• Self-Reflection – Taking quiet alone time to become conscious of/reflect on your motives and actions.
• Nourishment – Nourishment can also happen on the emotional level and doesn’t just refer to physical nourishment through food. We can nourish ourselves emotionally by taking alone time for ourselves, saying “No” to others when we don’t want to do something, trusting our intuition and getting into alignment with ourselves so that no one can knock us out of balance.

ENERGETIC LAYER // the transformation

• Paradigm Shift (the shift) – A change in your assumptions and/or beliefs/and or approach in the way you see things. This often happens when something you’ve been doing for years no longer works and you see there is another way that you didn’t know about. Hence, you don’t know what you don’t know. This happens a lot when people go beyond Western medicine into energy work and alternative medicine.
• Energetic Boundaries – Listen to our feature on Boundaries. Having clear boundaries is essential for your health and well-being.
• Flow State – This is a state of mind you can get into when you’re doing what you love and time seems to fly by. It could be when you’re cooking, meditating, playing with your children, engaging in work you love- you simply are in your flow without resistance.
• Pleasure – After experiencing the trauma of any kind (medical, verbal, physical, etc) many people including Amie could not enjoy pleasure because it was too scary to actually feel pleasure when you’ve been in such traumatic experiences previously. On top of that Amie had a limiting belief that she did not deserve pleasure and that she had to work hard and believed “no pain, no gain” which did not allow any pleasure into her life and led to her feeling depleted, deprived and shut down on the physical, emotional and energetic layers.
• Receiving + Allowing –  The act of receiving and allowing plays a role in our health because many of us do not know how to receive and this can be tied into worthiness (above). To heal the body, we must be able to receive love, care, abundance, etc. from yourself and others.
• Letting Go – allowing what no longer serves you to be left behind to free yourself. Listen to our feature about Letting Go.
• Synchronicity – Events that happen in your life that are quite hard to believe because it feels like ‘magic’. The events seem to be related but they have no causal relationship. This happens often when you’re in the flow state (above) during the healing process.
• Resistance – The heavy momentum you feel in your body (usually in your chest area or your head) when you have a belief that is not in alignment with what you’re thinking or doing.
• Alignment – Living in the present moment and living your truth (not doing things that you don’t want to be doing, saying, etc.) is a great way to start to align your energy with your lifestream. When people get themselves into alignment, they often experience synchronicity (above) very often in their lives and they feel that their lives are in a constant flow state (above).
• Conditioning – The associations we made (and continue to make) based on our surroundings. We all have conditioning from our parents and teachers and coaches and friends and movies and commercials, etc. that have positively and negatively impacted our lives through beliefs we created and we’ve taken these beliefs on unconsciously as children (as well as throughout our adult life).
• Inner Power – Realizing the power is inside of you and all the answers you need are inside of you. We’re taught that all the answers are outside of us but they’re not. The ‘noise’ outside of us in the form of social media, TV, etc. is made to distract us from ourselves and when we realize that and get quiet with ourselves, we can access this inner power to transform our health and our entire lives.
• Manifestation – Creating and curating the life you desire and deserve by releasing subconscious blocks (glass ceilings), getting into alignment with yourself and healing your past emotional pain.
• Clarity – Feeling clear, vastness and openness in your mind like there aren’t a ton of thoughts going through you pulling you around. Clarity comes from being in the flow state (above) and in alignment (above) with yourself and it often leads to incredible breakthroughs in your life.
• Energy Work + Energy Medicine – Working with the deeper layers of the body beyond the physical symptoms to address past traumas and blocks of energy in the body and the mind that are keeping you stuck and going in circles.
• Transformation – Shifting who we are to enter a state of wholeness. This is where the real healing takes place!

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