Getting Started
Learning to differentiate which aspect of the body we need to gather information on is the first step to identifying the issue and creating a plan of action. When it comes to the physical body, this pertains to every part of our physical beings. In this chapter we will begin navigating our way through our physical bodies. We will also learn how to gather proper data and/or a diagnosis to help establish a game plan for this area.
The first item of business when approaching any shift in healing is to collect our data. If something is affecting the physical body, you must first define the situation and get concrete facts to back it up. If it is a disease, illness, sickness, or issue (from most intense to least), first find out for certain exactly what it is you are dealing with. A proper defining or diagnosis of the issue is paramount to making the correct first steps in the right direction, even though the task can be daunting. If you need to obtain a diagnosis, the process will likely and hopefully include tests, X-rays, scans, fluid samples, and so on. So many people fit into the camp of not really knowing for sure what the diagnosis even is. Because there are so many false positive and false negative results out there, always seek a second opinion (or more if you need to). If you have an issue and not an illness (e.g., an emotional situation that has gotten to be too difficult to manage alone), it might not require a specific diagnosis through physical testing but may still require a specific definition or diagnosis laid out by a different professional. It may be a cognitive therapist, a spiritual counselor, or any range of practitioners from the alternative, regenerative, functional, or integrative medical side. This is the time to seek someone who is wise and practiced, not friends or coaches. Diagnostics come in many forms. Be open to all through the specific intended avenues necessary to obtain your correct starting point.
Next, we need to center, get on the same team within ourselves, and clearly define our intentions. And to define our intentions, we must go back to answering the big three questions in the previous chapter. Only after this can we collect and assemble our outside team: a medical team, alternative healing team, spirit team, and any cheerleaders (the people you surround yourself with who are helpful in your healing).
Before we begin, please know that magic and miracles can happen at any time along this path. It is most important to be open to this concept. Look wide, search far, and trust your inner guidance. Your soul always knows the way.
The physical body is where we feel the experiences of our bodies being healthy or not. It is also the place from where we need to collect the most data to make decisions. This is the layer of ourselves that likely requires medical teams—our primary care doctor and any specialists if needed. We need doctors who have their finger on the pulse of the latest research according to their field and who are willing to listen to and work with us.
The next step after finding out your true starting point is the other big-ticket item: research. When engaging in research, you must be willing to look at both sides of the aisle. Research should be all-encompassing—much more than just looking on the internet! As well, it’s more than just meeting with doctors, sharing with friends, and asking for advice or stories others have heard. All of these things are part of research, but there’s much more. Research could also be opening yourself up in a way you have never done before in order to find as much information as possible. Search for it and find it from any place it comes.
Not every answer will be at your current medical provider’s office, though it’s equally as true that you’ll receive important information there, so stay open to all information that comes your way.
There Is Always Another Way
The three most researched and practiced medical systems used throughout the world are Western medicine, Chinese Medicine, and Ayurevedic medicine. Each of these approaches to health care is vastly different from the others and therefore offer totally unique approaches to prevention, recovery, and health. Just because you might only be familiar with one approach does not negate the validity of the others. People jump on a plane and fly across the world to save their lives when they may have exhausted all efforts of the health care local to their area. So when I discuss research, I’m asking that you look beyond the one scope you’ve been told to look at for healing. Each of the different ways of approaching the body carry with it hundreds to thousands of years of research and discovery.
Here is what I know to be true: there is always another way. There is always an alternative approach to healing that can put you in the same end game as another approach. One is not uniformly better; one works better for you personally. The task is to find that route if the first one isn’t working. Does this mean that a holistic approach or the Western medical approach are the only way, and you should disregard anything else? Definitely not. With the right diagnosis and correct information, you can go down both paths simultaneously—the “straight” one that is prescribed and customarily offered and the alternate route that might be a bit more esoteric and unusual. One does not take away from the other. More times than not, you need both in order to get long-lasting, life-changing results. I believe incorporating healing opportunities beyond the standard protocol of anything is where recovery lives, more so than simply getting to the place where things are simply manageable.
There is always some sort of help, answer, treatment, or opportunity that may be what saves you or a loved one’s life. An alternative route exists somewhere. It is up to you to find the best avenues for your healing, wherever that may take you. People who live in other countries pack up their stuff and come to this country for treatments that are not offered in their countries just as people in our country pack up and head out to places to do the same. Why? Because there is always another avenue for healing. Understand that there is no implication that the answers to your healing live across the world. A certain treatment that you find that is from another part of the world might have practitioners right down the road from you once you start searching for them. Willingness and curiosity separate the survivors from the thrivers, and my vote is always for all of us to thrive.
The Matchmaker
I pride myself on being a really great matchmaker for two things:
1. Animals: I can put a dog or cat with the right people or family. It’s an instinct, and I do it well.
2. Healing: I can put people on a healing path with fantastic options of who to see for their healing. People tell me what’s going on, and I sit with it for a bit and then feel in my gut where they need to go to help them along their path. I am not a medical intuitive, but I am intuitive when it comes to health and healing options that I believe could be beneficial.
A friend I met in yoga class told me that she suffers greatly from a spinal condition called ankylosing spondylitis for which she’s been on medication for more than a decade. I suggested she see a craniosacral therapist as well as a local acupuncturist who is a retired neurologist from Beijing. It turned out that the acupuncturist did not think the condition was the correct diagnosis and instead believed it to be neurological. He then sent her to a neurological specialist who diagnosed her with migraines—she didn’t have the spinal issue at all! With this correct diagnosis, they were able to treat her easily and with much milder treatments. She told me at class that thanks to my suggestion, she found the correct issue and treatment and now is off the meds for the spondylitis. She is now on a medication for the migraines that works fast and stops the three-day flare-ups she had always believed to be spondylitis flares. Now she can move and practice yoga without the constant pain. This is a simple example of how getting the proper diagnosis and treatment is the most important step in any healing process. Everyone makes their decisions on health and healing based on their own experiences and belief systems, and doctors are no different. Be mindful of who you are seeing for your issues and know that you might need to visit more than one specialist to confirm a diagnosis.
If you are faced with needing to heal something big, be willing to move outside of the belief systems you or those around you have set for you and be willing to look through a much wider lens into what is possible. Put it in steps as you determine your best plan for health and healing. Remember that the process goes both ways: when it comes to anyone else’s healing choices, it is not your right to judge another’s approach to their health and healing either.
When a very close family member was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was speaking with a respected elder and confided in him what was going on. I said that given the triple negative markers (meaning the cancer was multiplying at a fast-acting pace), my family member had decided to forgo the lumpectomy and go for a radical double mastectomy. His response to me was, “You are not going to let them cut into her, are you? Those surgeons are butchers!” While I appreciated his two cents, I also had great respect for my family member for being so brave and doing what it took to save her life. Had I turned on her and decided the elder was right and surgeons are nothing but butchers, I could not have been the support person she needed me to be. Imagine if I had acted in a behavior consistent with the opinions of someone else and taken them on as my own. Instead, I was in that chemo suite for every appointment, and I emptied her drains after surgery three times a day. I was the one she leaned on and needed as her support person. I was blown away by her strength and conviction. She saved her own life by making that decision, and she was quick about it too. She didn’t hesitate. She told the surgeon what they were going to do, and she wanted to do it the following week.
If whoever you saw today doesn’t have the answers you need, do not stop there. Go find someone else, another practitioner from another narrative of diagnostics. Search out further and wider and find someone who specializes in the part of your body you need information about. Your body is your temple, so you must take charge of whatever might be happening within it. Essential to this process is knowing where you are starting from, which is where Western allopathic methods belong, whether in the form of a proper diagnosis that can only be known through the avenues of proper testing, scans, blood or lab work, or something clinical. Never take anyone’s word for what you might be experiencing without anything to back it up. We have to be a part of this process. If you get a diagnosis (or worse, a guess) that doesn’t feel right, do not stop. Go seek another opinion. If my doctors or specialists can’t find an answer, I keep knocking on the healing doors until I find the answers that resonate with me. To put it another way, you could go to five doctors who specialize in the same field and get five different answers for your health. Tests are definitive, but the treatments and other options are the result of each individual’s knowledge and instincts. It is therefore crucial to line up with those that best fit your needs. If the first approach doesn’t resonate, keep looking. Even the medical field is full of contradictions. We are all human doing the best we can with what we’ve got.
Research
The research part of any healing journey is as important as finding the right diagnosis. Facts are necessary for giving us the starting point that we need in order to create our best route to healing. However, are facts really our friends? In this day and age, we must understand a few things. First, even in scientific research, whoever is doing the research can skew the science and testing to support their initial hypothesis. Research can be very biased. We need to understand that there are different types of research that mean different things, and so what we look for when reading it will be different too. The other part of any research you need to ask and find out is, who funded this particular research? It is a proven fact that many of the research links and arguments for certain illnesses were funded by the companies who created the medicine for it, a practice that is so common (and dangerous) in our world because these companies bank on the fact that you don’t know any better and take all the research and findings at face value. It’s often that we don’t find out until it’s much too late that the research was funded through those pharmaceutical companies with potentially skewed results. Not enough people know to follow up with a scrutiny that is worthy of such research offerings. Questions to consider when looking at any research:
1. Who did the funding?
2. Who did the research?
3. Does any research exist with double-blind or peer-reviewed studies? (and what do those things even mean?)
At this stage (on the physical layer), it is important to do some fact-checking about an illness, its diagnosis, and any possible treatments, so be sure you come into any research knowing what to really look for in your findings. Until someone pointed these things out to me and I studied them in my graduate program at my university, I had no idea how wide and varied research really is. It wasn’t until I went back to school that I learned to ask question such as, “Is it peer reviewed?” and “Can it be proven?” And it was through the autism community that I learned to question who was behind research in the first place. How was it funded? Which doctors were chosen for the studies, and who do those doctors work for? Those questions are very important to answer before you make a decision about early treatment.
Let’s define these research elements so you know better what to search for. I’m going to simplify each one of the terms affiliated with studies. Why is this important to know? Because if you do have any particular illness and you are doing your research and you come across a shot or pill that looks like it’s going to work for you, you must know where those studies have come from and who funded them. Too many times studies are bought and paid for by the medical companies or their doctors, or the research was not conducted objectively with double-blind controls or placebos.
Blind study: One party in the research is in the know of the testing procedures and the person being tested is not. These can be very misleading and biased. Be careful with blind studies.
Double-blind study: Both the tester and the subject are blinded to the testing process. This is the best environment for fairness in research.
Peer-reviewed study: After reviewing the initial findings or studies conducted, other doctors, researchers, or people in the same field approve the quality or competence of the initial findings. You can find examples in scholarly research sites such as googlescholar.com, pubmed.com, and scholarly journals. These are more trustworthy sources.
Meta-analysis: Research from several different studies and resources is pulled and collected in a single report. Some people love meta-analysis because of the wide range of research in one place, while others prefer a more concrete single study.
Placebo studies: When a study group takes whatever product or ingredient is being tested and another group thinks they are taking the same product but in actuality are taking something like a sugar pill or another option that is fake. The groups don’t know which product they actually received, and therefore the results are unbiased.
The most honest and fair research is published in scholarly journals in the same field. However, this does not mean that the research was not funded by companies with a serious interest in the results of said studies. Again, you need to keep looking into the research to figure out what is being presented and how it got there.
Research and Funding
This is the tricky grey area for research, and it can bite you if you let it. If the research is government-funded, then by law any literature must list who provided the funding for the studies. However, if the research is privately funded (as is the case with so many pharmaceutical research studies), they are not required by law to disclose who was funding the research. Companies who have a vested interest in the results generally hire their own team of experts to lead the studies and do not disclose that they are behind it. Once published, they are quick to put it out everywhere and call it fact. When you are doing your own research to find medical answers for yourself or a loved one, you must be extremely skeptical when reading research.
Research the pros, research the cons. Research the allopathic Western medical side, research the traditional Eastern medical side, and try your best to research beyond both. Find stories of people who have done amazing things in the realm of what you yourself need in order to restore balance to your system. Find out how they did it. You cannot afford to be narrow-minded in your search or stop after the first result.
Alternative Research
This is the part about research where I take you away from the funding, testing, and scholarly articles. Now we shift your attention and focus to reviews from actual people who have received treatments. Peer-reviewed research is valuable, but the main purpose of it is usually publication. Reviews from real people who have used the products or received the treatments hold considerable weight when you are searching for your next steps on your journey
However, the phrase “alternative research” does not allude to alternative truths. Instead, it leans to a negative bias toward certain treatments either because not enough laboratory testing has been able to prove the efficacy or because a lot of holistic or herbal treatments are not recognized by the regulatory agencies and therefore are assumed to be bunk. Many times, science is late on the findings. Keep an open mind to hearing personal experiences, as they might serve you well.
Just because a product or treatment has not been academically or formally vetted does not mean it is not highly effective or healthy. I’m going to contradict what I said earlier on research and say that it’s my personal perception that not everything on the Quackwatch website deserves to be there. For example, NAET (Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique, which is covered later on) appears as a Quackwatch result.5 However, I have recently found research-based articles published in medical and scholarly journals stating NAET’s effectiveness.6 For myself as well as my family, it has been one of the strongest and most beneficial treatments in our arsenal for healing every person in my family for various issues.
Research, Review, and Trust
Here is where we add the third component to the first two (gather your facts and information, and research every angle in which to find the avenues that will offer healing, respectively): tap into your Divine inner wisdom to figure out which move to make. Gather, look, listen, and move. Going with your gut is the movement part of the equation. Figuring out which way to move is through the inner wisdom responses. You cannot do this alone—no one can. From here, your action will be about tapping into the higher source to guide you to each next best step in your healing journey.
Every morning we need to start our day with a quick check-in with our body to determine how we are feeling and where we are at. Feel your body with your mind, starting from your feet and working all the way through the stations: ankles, knees, hips, stomach/gut, chest, low back, spine, whole back, shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, hands, neck, ears, mouth, nose, chin, cheeks, forehead, eyes, scalp of the head. Is anything feeling off ? Does any place hurt? Does it feel tight or sore anywhere? When you go to the bathroom, are all systems go? While small, these are basic things that need attention. Remember that little things that go ignored can easily become the bigger things, so pay attention to every part of your body. If you answered yes to “Does anything hurt,” look more deeply into that answer. Where does it hurt? Why does it hurt? Is it surface level or might it be deeper, like in an organ? Is it a bruise or is something happening? Can you pinpoint the exact location or is it an area? Should you call your doctor and have it looked at? These are extremely important things to ask yourself. If your answer is “I probably should call my doctor but can’t afford it/don’t want to deal with it/don’t have time for it/don’t really care,” these are also important things to note! Next we go into a different set of questions: “Is this something with my mood, emotions, or mind?” “Am I feeling disconnected from myself and my body? Am I possibly feeling depressed or anxious?” Look into these answers as well and see if you have the same four responses as above. And after you’ve had your wake-up time maybe within an hour of waking, ask the really important question that might take care of all the rest: Are you hungry? Have you eaten? When was the last time you ate? So many times, we are moody, cranky, disconnected, or agitated (“hangry,” as they call it) if our blood sugar is not balanced. Simplistic as they might sound, the body scan and check-in are important tools in your arsenal that need to be used every single day. Our bodies are master communicators, so it’s high time we start learning how to listen! Make notes to yourself if something comes up so that you don’t shrug it off as something insignificant. You can’t track information if it’s not ever catalogued. Maybe do a hand-written journal or a spreadsheet on your computer—just something on the side to note symptoms and situations that arise during your scans.
I hope this chapter expanded your horizons on research—what it can be and what it might not be. I hope that it got you practicing your body scan daily and really beginning to tune in on a deeper level within your physical body. Ignoring little symptoms here and there can lead to big issues with time. It’s up to each of us to be on top of our own game. That starts here.
5. Stephen Barrett, “Applied Kinesiology: Phony Muscle-Testing for ‘Allergies’ and ‘Nutrient Deficiencies.’” https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/ak.html.
6. Caroline B. Terwee, “Successful treatment of food allergy with Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Techniques (NAET) in a 3-year-old: A Case Report,” September 19, 2008. Doi: 10.1186/1757-1626-1-166.