***************
My Approach to
Mind-Body-Spirit Healing
Being yourself is hard. Living with the regret of having lived your life according to other people’s expectations is hard. Pick your hard.
—jordan bach
When I was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease in 2007, I was shoved into a whole new world. It seemed the common consensus among patients was that even doctors couldn’t fix this. Growing up, I knew doctors only as heroes and my personal safety net. When we were sick, we’d go to them and they’d fix us. So now again, they would come through, I was sure. But after torturous years of failed medical treatments, I was finally faced with the truth: sometimes even a hero is gonna have to let you down.
It was then, and then only, that I ever even entertained the possibility that there was another way this all worked besides a simple equation of physical ailment equals physical fix. It turns out, there is way more to it than that.
In this chapter, you’ll discover the basics of the energy body, how certain kinds of stress affect the energy body, the importance of self-healing, and my three-part approach to healing. This will give you a strong foundation of understanding for what you’ll experience with this book.
The Body’s Energy System
Our bodies are so much more than what we see. Actually, everything is so much more than what we see. Everything is really just energy.
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane to elementary school science where we most likely learned, and then forgot, that everything in the universe vibrates. Each and every atom has a specific vibratory motion. Each motion has a frequency (the number of oscillations per second) that can be measured in hertz. Frequency, simply put, is the rate of electrical energy flow that is constant between any two points.
Just as the universe operates on energy, we as human beings operate on an intricate energy system too, one that affects all of our organs, muscles, glands, and more. It is fueled by electrical impulses that run through us.
This energy system is at the core of how our brain functions, how our muscles and nerves receive messages from the brain, and how our moods and thoughts interplay in our lives. You may already be familiar with the concept of energy in the body because of the use of EEGs measuring brain waves, EKGs measuring the electrical activity of the heart, and other diagnostic medical tools. Much energy in the body can be easily measured with tools like these, while some energy, often referred to as “subtle,” is not yet detectable by these types of tools. Some types of subtle energies include electromagnetic energy, magnetic vibrations, and biomagnetic fields. Subtle energy is something that has been seen and felt by healers and energy-sensitive people for thousands of years.
Many ancient medical systems, including Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, are based on the body’s energy system. Within the energy system of the body there are various types of energy patterns, like chakras, meridians, auras, layers, and more. The two patterns we will be working directly with through techniques in this book are meridians and chakras. Meridians are energy pathways in the body. Each meridian flows through the body, delivering energy to the organs and tissues along its designated pathway. You’ll learn more about meridians in chapter 7 when you learn Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Chakras are spinning energy centers in the body that hold old stories. Each chakra governs a specific part of the body and affects the organs and tissues in that area of the body. You’ll learn more about chakras in chapter 8 when you learn the Chakra Tapping technique.
When our energy fields are being disrupted, flow irregularly, or become sluggish and blocked, we can begin to experience symptoms. Energy disruptions can be felt in the body. They can feel like there is a knot in the pit of your stomach when you’re scared, burning in your chest when you’re hurt emotionally, or an achiness in your back or neck when you’re in a state of inner conflict. You are experiencing what happens when your energy isn’t flowing properly to your organs, glands, and muscles with the energy they need to thrive.
Energy flows through different areas in our bodies. If there is a blockage in one part of the energy system, it will likely affect some of the other organs, muscles, and glands connected by the same energy flow. For example, the stomach meridian (the energy pathway related to the energetic field of the stomach) runs up the front of the body and wraps around the eyes. If there is an imbalance in this “route” or pathway, a person may experience symptoms in their stomach but also their sinuses, because both areas share that energy flow. Another example is the gallbladder meridian, or pathway. While it governs and feeds the energy of the gallbladder, it also runs through the knees. It’s not uncommon to have knee pain while experiencing an energy blockage in the gallbladder.
Disease and illness may manifest as chemical or physical imbalances, but they originate as “kinks” in the energy system. In fact, imbalances in the subtle energy field can be detected before symptoms arise in the physical body. All the organs, cells, and tissues in the body have an energetic frequency. Our thoughts have a frequency. Your body’s energy system works in patterns that can be manipulated and changed. This means that by understanding and practicing with just a few principles, you’ll see how you can access, improve, and eventually optimize these energies for your healing.
While various factors such as food and pollution have been shown to affect the vibrational frequency of the body, my own research led me to the work of Bruce Lipton, PhD. Dr. Lipton is a cellular biologist and author of the New York Times bestseller The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, and Miracles. He is a leader in the field of epigenetics, the study of how our biology, including genetic factors, adapt to our environment. His work is based largely on the effects of stress on the human body, and their link to disease and illness. Dr. Lipton shares a critical message through his work: the body’s physiology has the ability to respond and adapt to thoughts and emotions. You are not controlled by your genetic makeup. Instead, which genes are turned “on” and which are turned “off” is a process largely determined by your thoughts, emotions, and perceptions.
This offers incredible hope to all of us because it means we have more power than we ever may have believed to affect our lives. It is clear now that we are not hostages of our genes, bad luck, bad experiences, or fate. Our well-being is linked to our attitudes and perceptions.
These types of findings brought me to the conclusion that stress could be the single most influential factor of many disease processes and psychological challenges we face. In an effort to heal fully, I had tried every detox, diet, and medical treatment, and I eventually realized there was nothing left to correct except myself. Since wildly chasing bacteria, viruses, mold, parasites, and my own unruly cells didn’t seem to be effective, I integrated what I learned from Dr. Lipton and focused instead on my energetic and emotional health. I knew of many people who had been bitten by ticks or exposed to similar things, yet they were not experiencing the same deep level of illness. I knew deep down, in spite of all other factors, that if I could get my mind, body, and spirit strong enough, it would be my best defense against all else.
The Stress Mess
Stress is something I used to think of as running around trying to get my to-do list done, working hard, and dealing with the ups and downs of life. But I learned how very inaccurate that perspective is. The types of stress that create the most impact on our bodies does not come from rushing to get to work, having too much laundry, and more. It comes from physiological stress. Physiological stress comes from the body being in a heightened state of panic or fear, often called the fight, flight, or freeze pattern.
Sometimes, new clients come to me and say they are experiencing panic attacks, illness, or other challenges from doing “too much,” working too hard, and running on empty for too long. And while this pattern of pushing ourselves past our limits is certainly an energy drain, the “doing” isn’t the real problem. The reason we are pushing is the problem. Forcing ourselves to move at a pace that clashes with our spirit, or who we really are, is the core issue. The reasons we are living this way are where the true work lies.
I’ll use myself as an example to demonstrate this point. I love to do, do, do. Part of it is my personality and that’s just fine. I love to have a few projects going, read two books at once, and sometimes become completely lost in something. But this aspect of my personality is not what created unease and illness in my body. The reasons that I pushed myself too hard did. Back in the day, I often pushed because I wanted to be successful, perfect, and in control of everything in my life. These reasons are what catapulted me into the fight, flight, or freeze response. These reasons caused illness.
Humans are pretty darn resilient creatures. We can do a whole lot before we break. But we cannot clash against our spirit or the true nature of who we are. We just don’t get away with that for too long.
Stress, or the fight, flight, or freeze response, is governed by a specific energy force in the body called the triple warmer meridian. I like to think of the triple warmer meridian as an inner protective “papa bear.” When we hold unresolved emotional experiences in our bodies, we can become suspended in a place where the triple warmer meridian is in a state of panic or overdrive. It is not the stress itself that is necessarily a danger, but our bodies’ reactions to that stress. In this fight, flight, or freeze state, the triple warmer meridian is doing everything it can to protect us (like a papa bear does for his cub), but it drains energy from the spleen, which supports the immune system. The triple warmer meridian also governs habits. When the triple warmer meridian is on high alert, it resists change in an effort to keep us safe. This is one reason that when we are in a state of stress, it can be so darn difficult to change habits. We often find ourselves resisting help, rebelling against things we know would be good for us, and abandoning self-care. It is because our triple warmer meridian’s resistance to change is working as a form of self-sabotage, perceiving anything new or different as more stress.
When this energy dynamic is at play, the following physiological stress reactions are also taking place:
• Blood is shunted away from the gastrointestinal tract, spleen, and other non-vital organs.
• The body makes additional glucose.
• The immune system becomes suppressed, in part through the production of high cortisol levels brought on by the release of adrenaline.
• The areas of the brain related to short- and long-term memory are affected.
• Heart rate and blood pressure increase.
Stress hormones have been found to inhibit the production of anti-inflammatory cytokines and increase the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Cytokines are specific proteins that are responsible for signaling between cells to trigger the inflammation process in response to danger and decrease the process when the stress is over.
While stress is usually seen as a negative, it’s important to point out that stress can be beneficial if we need the surge of chemicals to help us fight (defend ourselves), flight (escape the situation), or freeze (blend in or hide) to avoid danger. A great example of how the stress response should work is what happens in the wild. Animals exhibit this behavior (tigers “fight,” rabbits “freeze,” and antelope take “flight”) but then shake, tremble, or otherwise let go of that state so they can continue in their environment. This pattern actually helps them stay alive. However, many of us get caught in this perpetual state, never releasing it from our system and returning to neutral.
A big challenge is that our systems cannot determine the difference between stresses due to an actual threat and those stemming from unresolved emotional conflict, unprocessed trauma (experiences), or an unhealthy emotional pattern like using negative self-talk.
If we do not resolve these types of emotional patterns, our bodies may react in a harmful way. In my experience, physiological stress can be caused by anything that keeps us from relaxing or feeling safe in this world, emotionally or physically. This absolutely includes, above all else, not feeling safe to be our true selves. These are things we might not even realize are affecting us, and probably definitely not to the extent they are. In fact, it is completely possible to be stressed at a deep level but not feel stressed, as you would normally identify with it.
There are endless studies that cite stress as the dominating factor in many psychological conditions and physical diseases. However, stress itself isn’t even so much the problem. It is how we react to those stressful influences that causes the internal stress, which closes us off to our well-being. In other words, the problem is our relationship with stress.
The Question of “Why Me?”
When I first discovered all of this information you are now learning, I blamed myself. I questioned how some people, who had survived unspeakable traumas like war, could live happily and healthily into their nineties. And how someone like myself, who grew up with copious amounts of love and nothing I’d consider as traumatic as something like war, could end up where I was. Eventually, I realized that these struggles of mine were in no way due to flaws or failures of those who raised me, or something inherently wrong with me, either. They just were. Perhaps I was just born a sensitive soul. Perhaps this was simply meant to be my journey for a time. Without knowing the intricacies or answers, I let it all be okay. It was just time to move onward.
Now, I often get “why me?” from clients. Why can’t I handle things when I know others who have been through worse? Why can’t I get over it already? What’s wrong with me? I want to explain this a bit further because it’s so important.
First, there are emotional forces—beliefs, past experiences, perceptions, discomfort with who we are, and more—in each of us. These beliefs react with our energy system and this determines how we react to outside influences. Most of us have tried to change our external lives, but alas, we remain imbalanced, unhappy, or unhealthy. And while it’s essential to listen to your heart in terms of leaving toxic relationships and making other changes that are good for your soul, it can be a faulty plan to rely on that completely. When you look at the effort and energy it takes to constantly try to control or adapt to situations around you—whether it be chasing viruses or trying to change stressful circumstances in life—you will find that this, in and of itself, is stressful. And you will learn that it is far easier to make any necessary changes that your soul desires when you feel better about yourself.
Second, there are two types of energies with which you may have come to this world. These are past-life energies and generational energies. Let me briefly explain.
Past-Life Energies
The concept of past lives is built on the idea or belief that before you came here, to this earth, you lived many lives before. You had experiences, connections, and relationships that you still carry with you from those past lives that may be negatively affecting your experience here in this life. For example, perhaps in a past life you were a mother who lost her child in a car accident. It is possible that in this lifetime you will still hold some of the fears or memories in your energy field, which are impeding your experience now. This was not something I explored during my healing process, but it is something I have seen to be beneficial for clients to work on. While there are many professionals who specialize in past-life regression (a process of leading you back into that past life in order to heal it), I will teach you how I clear energies that come from past-life experiences.
Generational Energies
Generational energies are energies you inherited from your ancestors. You might have heard various names for these energies, including inherited energies or ancestral energies. In the same way we can inherit genes or personality traits from our parents and ancestors, we sometimes inherit their energies, too. These energies can be in the form of unresolved emotion from experiences from their lives, beliefs, or fears. Many people who are carrying around heavy generational energies may feel like they’ve always had a cloud over their head. They may have a difficult time determining when it started or where it’s from. They may describe it as not feeling like their own—and this is accurate because their body doesn’t sense a point of origin for it. I see this often in families with heavy energy lineages, like Holocaust survivors. If you suspect this is relevant to you (and even if you don’t), it’s wise to explore it.
When you work with generational energies, it’s important to know that everyone has them. There is no reason to be angry with your parents or ancestors. We can pass along lots of stuff to our kids and no one is immune. It’s part of life to work this stuff out. While these energies may not be “ours,” they are our responsibility to clear for ourselves. I believe that these energies keep getting passed down until they perhaps reach a person who is evolved and conscious enough to be capable of clearing them. This is a great opportunity for you to turn around a long-held familial pattern.
While past-life and generational energies can be important, it’s essential that we don’t get into a place of focusing primarily on them. I have never seen these energies be more important in the healing process than one’s own experiences, beliefs, and other patterns. They are certainly worth exploring, but do not allow yourself to use them as a distraction from your own “stuff.”
Perhaps it’s your own life experience that has brought you to this place, or perhaps you have some of the “born with” energies and they are affecting you. It’s likely a mix of both. If you are not healing or finding happiness like you thought you would, or like you thought you should, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. In fact, it means you are exceptional. You are breaking through, breaking free, breaking open in ways that could happen only by having your patience and persistence challenged. Vitamin B or detoxing or the strongest treatment on earth could not do for you what this process is doing for you.
But the real answer to the “why me?” question is that the answer doesn’t matter. You are where you are for some reason that you might not fully understand. But this I’m sure of: the universe, and your body, will not let you do what you’ve been doing any longer—living small or whatever else you’ve been up to. This is both the human burden and the gift. This is meant to be your path. Not forever, though. You get to move on from here.
Change Your Relationship with Stress
The body has the incredible ability both to protect and defend itself (via the fight, flight, or freeze response) and to heal and repair itself. The only catch is that these processes cannot happen simultaneously. The body can only settle into full healing mode once we take it out of its crisis mode, or sustained stress state. This does not in any way mean that you have to be stress-free to heal. It simply means that it is your work to do what you can to make your body feel safe enough to do so.
The best way to get the body to relax enough to heal is by turning off the fight, flight, or freeze pattern. In other words, we need to convince the triple warmer meridian that it’s safe to come out of intense papa bear mode. A proven method of doing this is by turning on the relaxation response, a term coined by Dr. Herbert Benson, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.2 The relaxation response is a physical state of relaxation that can be achieved by participating in activities such as yoga, energy healing, acupuncture, prayer, meditation, qi gong, and many other modalities—all of which create the opposite effect of the fight, flight, or freeze response. In fact, the relaxation response is so powerful that you can see its potential in the common phenomenon where people who have food allergies will often see a dramatic decrease or disappearance in reactions while they are on vacation. This is because their body is not being triggered into a stress response in the same way it usually is at home. Perhaps they feel less fearful to be themselves in a place where nobody knows them, or their boss is not triggering the “I’m not good enough” feeling that causes stress, and more.
My own process, which you’ll be practicing throughout this entire book, is effective because we are always working directly with releasing that root emotional imbalance and its relationship to stress in the energy system. Utilizing an approach called energy psychology, which is the basis of this book, does this. Energy psychology simply refers to techniques that specifically address the relationship between our energy system and our emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Accessing and working with our energy system in this way gives us the opportunity to change our relationship to stress, which helps us become the most integrated, joyful version of ourselves.
Energy work gives us a tool to talk our triple warmer meridian (aka the papa bear meridian) off the ledge and onto more stable ground. It is only then that the body can move from a place of defense and protection to the place of instigating its powerful self-healing ability.
In order to heal fully and completely, we need to change our physiological response to stress. When you do this, you will not be a prisoner of worry, fearing that stress can take you down. I remember doctors telling me, even as I healed, that I would always be at high risk for relapse if I got stressed. If I caught a cold or the flu, did too much, or ate sugar, I would end up sick again, they’d say. This is a very common experience for many, and I was informed of it in only well-meaning ways; however, this became not only a personal belief of mine but also a stress in and of itself because I ended up feeling out of control and helpless. I can’t handle stress. I’ll get sick again if I catch a cold. Relapse is inevitable.
It tortured me, but it didn’t have to, because I eventually learned that once you do the inner work and strengthen your being at a core level, which includes changing your relationship with stress, you are no longer the fragile person you might have been before. It’s essential to update your mental records about this. You can take a little roughing around. You can get well, and stay well, even when you have too much to do, eat some sugar, or catch a cold.
To be completely empowered (and successful!), it is far more intelligent to shift our relationships and reactions to external influences, so we can remain stable even on shaky ground.
The Benefit of Self-Healing
Don’t fear if you are sitting frozen wondering how you will ever get from where you are now to a place where you can express and live from your true self while feeling calm and balanced.
It’s likely to happen in comfortable baby steps instead of giant leaps. As you’ll be learning more about shortly, feeling out of control is one of the biggest triggers for us feeling unsafe in this world. Self-healing immediately works on counteracting that deep-seated feeling with every application you practice. In essence, it reverses helplessness. By embracing self-healing, you will learn to feel safe in your own hands, affirming the message of “I can be okay,” no matter what, and “I can help myself !” In other words, the sheer act of taking your healing into your own hands sends a strong message to the body of safety and capability, actually reversing the fight, flight, or freeze response. The practice of self-healing acts as its own healing modality. You will soon come to see that you are the key to a process of which you felt so wildly out of control.
The only requirement for success is that we need to do our own work. Even while using the support of medicine or other alternatives, we cannot excuse ourselves from the biggest part of the process. People often feel pressure to choose one way or another—Western medicine or natural healing. But the truth is that there is no right or wrong path. We just have to meet our chosen medicine halfway. Even for those who prefer to use natural healing, medical intervention does not have to feel like failure in any way. Treatment often gives us time to heal the real wounds. Any healing approach can be beneficial for us when we find a way to feel good about it. The bottom line is that we need to become an environment where healing happens. We need to clean up our soil. And the best way I know to do that is by addressing your whole self—mind (mental patterns), body (physical self, including energetic patterns in the body), and spirit (the energy of who you really are at the core).
An Introduction to My Three-Part Approach to Healing
You may remember the tree analogy from earlier. Deep and permanent healing comes from cleaning up the soil of your life so that you can be who you really are. Everything that will help you heal ultimately comes down to that one focus, and that’s what my work is based on. Here, I’m going to briefly outline my approach to healing that we’ll be going through together in Section II.
Part One: Surrender, Accept, and Flow
Before you can even begin to heal, you have to surrender to where you are as your starting point. You have to be able to look at yourself as that tree with some brittle leaves and soil that could use love, and become okay with where you currently are. Being right where you are and being at peace with that is a required part of the healing process. Actually, it’s a required part of life. I know it sucks and you’re trying desperately to get to a better place, but learning to accept exactly where you are now in all of your ungraceful glory is super-duper important. Learning to forgive yourself, laugh at yourself, and stop beating yourself up about every little thing is, ironically, part of why you’re here. You must learn to be easier on yourself. You must stop wasting your energy fighting so darn hard. Fixing things might be your goal, but learning to feel better about the things you want to fix is an essential part of your journey.
Learning the art of surrender is essential, because in that space, there is great opportunity to create a foundation for your healing. This includes starting to work with energy and thought patterns. Through this, you can practice being gentle with yourself. You will need this skill, because a being who is berated will not easily heal. You know how it feels when other people have done this to you? All the years of trying to unravel the messages you got from parents, teachers, and others? “You should do more.” “You should be more.” “Hurry up and succeed.” Well, you need to start doing the opposite of that. You need to learn to be lighter on yourself. It’s a requirement for well-being. Instead, say things like, “It’s okay, I have time.” “I can relax.” “I’m doing just fine.” I promise, it will make a magical difference in your life.
Part Two: Identify Blockages
There are several things that block our healing process. In order to heal, each and every part of our being must be aligned with being well. While this seems obvious, the majority of my clients have some big resistance to being well. In other words, often at a subconscious level that they’re not aware of, they aren’t in full alignment with their own healing. Being in alignment means wanting to heal, feeling deserving of healing, knowing you are able to heal, being ready to heal, and more. If at any level, either consciously or unconsciously, part of you is resistant to overcoming your challenge, it’s going to be like climbing Mount Rainier against the wind. Maybe it already has been this difficult, and now you know why.
Let me show you this concept in action. Let’s say you started experiencing panic attacks right before the school spelling bee in eighth grade, an event at which you were convinced you’d fail. And because of that panic attack, your teacher let you sit out and just watch your classmates instead of participating. Can you see how now, even many years later, a part of you may not want to overcome these panic attacks because you learned that they protect you? Perhaps part of you, even if just subconsciously, still feels that you need the panic attacks to help you get out of scary things—like being humiliated or embarrassed by your peers. This type of scenario could prevent you from being in alignment with full healing. Alignment with our goal is something that we all need to pay very close attention to. Blocks that cause resistance to healing show up most commonly in people who experience “nothing working,” or every treatment making them feel worse.
The body’s language is also a great indicator of what emotional energy from the past or what current patterns need to be addressed and cleared for full and complete healing. The body’s symptoms are full of clues, messages, and metaphors that can help us identify exactly what needs to be healed inside. A huge key to healing, as you’ll learn, is actually finding what is standing in your way of it. Once you do that, you’ll be well on your way.
Part Three: Change Your Relationship with Stress
Stress is a buzzword we all hear often. But remember, stress itself is not actually the gigantic problem that we think it is. It’s your relationship with stress that is the problem. It’s important to identify and transform your relationship with stress instead of trying to eliminate stress itself. If you are experiencing physical symptoms, we can safely assume that your immune system is being suppressed—and your relationship with stress is a big reason why. And, if you are experiencing only emotional challenges, well, that makes it even more apparent that this stress factor is important to address.
The stressful reactions in your body come from things like these:
• Unprocessed experiences
• Harmful beliefs
• Unhealthy emotional patterns
• Fear
All of these aspects affect how you relate and respond in your life. Changing your relationship with stress by working with these main areas will have a huge impact on your life. Huge.
Now that you have a rundown of the process, it’s time to move on and get into some practice. Next, in Section II, we’ll be doing just that.
2. Herbert Benson, MD, RelaxationResponse.org, www.relaxationresponse.org.