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Keep Moving Forward
When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before.
—jacob riis
While my own healing journey felt erratic, with many ups and downs and in-betweens, each person’s will be different. And however yours plays out, it’s quite all right. There will be times that feel like smooth sailing, and others that feel like the healing seas are so tumultuous, you could be seasick. It’s all part of your ultimate healing.
It is often impossible to tell what’s going on inside of your body during the healing process, and it’s easy to feel like nothing is happening at all. I half-laugh, half-cringe now as I remember all of the moments when I would have traded my life savings to get one sneak peek into that body and brain of mine. I so often felt like I was looking into a clouded fishbowl trying to get a glimpse into one clear space of me to decipher what the heck was going on. And sometimes you will be that fishbowl, too.
As you move through those moments, being aware of patterns and receiving insight into what might be happening can be immensely helpful. I’m going to outline those patterns for you here.
Healing Patterns
While we need to learn to be okay with not always being able to constantly monitor our progress, there are some common healing patterns that I’ve seen over the years that will give you a little bit of inspiration to keep on keepin’ on. You may recognize one of these, or all of them, as your own. Our patterns of healing can be not only very different from each other but also different for us at different times in our own lives. Remember, by the time your body reaches the point of manifesting physical symptoms, the energetic imbalances have already been there for some time. The same idea applies to the manifestation of physical healing. The repair work often goes on for a long time before your body reaches the point of physical changes. There are many people who say that they suddenly, miraculously, healed. While healing can seem sudden, it’s usually not. It’s just that the culmination of all that has been happening appears at once.
I liken the process of healing to the growth of a baby. Imagine that a pregnant mother, desperate to see her growing baby, demands that her doctor perform a daily ultrasound as proof of the baby’s progress. It would be impossible to see the tiny day-to-day changes occurring in the baby’s growth, but at the end of nine months, the baby will have legs and arms and internal organs. Your healing is happening like this for you, too. It’s often impossible to see or feel these tiniest of shifts, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.
You are healing. It is happening—even if you can’t see it quite yet.
Pattern A: Ups, (Melt) Downs, and In-Betweens
There is one clue you can bet your money on that indicates you’re most definitely healing. It’s feeling an improvement in your emotional state of being. It can be even just 1 percent. Feeling better, or sturdier, emotionally is rock-solid evidence that you are well on your way to more improvements. The key is to allow that to be enough until the physical manifestations show up.
As you move along your healing journey, you will have moments or maybe even minutes or days when you feel like you are returning to yourself or your symptoms are waning. You will have a deep sense of all being well, knowing you will somehow, inevitably, be okay. This feeling may be fleeting, lasting only seconds at first, but you’ll recognize it. This is a glimpse of what is to come and stay. You may get the glimpses only occasionally at first, but over time they will occur closer together or perhaps last a bit longer. One day you will realize that although you still have many subpar moments to count, it is as if someone is stitching together the glimpses for you into the picture of health you want. If you can enjoy the glimpses while they are present, forming no attachment to holding on to them for fear they will leave, I promise they will return. Just think of them as your angels saying, “Keep going. You’re on the right track. We’re helping to make this a full-time gig for you.”
As an example, I’ll share a story about a client I worked with for a few months. Cindy was dealing with fibromyalgia. At the beginning of each session when I would call her, I would have no idea what kind of report I would get. It seemed like things were all over the place for her. She would be feeling stable one day, and then the next day it would feel to her as if the world were crashing down. Then she’d get over the hump and return to her baseline again (which was not, by the way, feeling good). But we kept on keeping on, knowing the work would be fruitful.
One day when we were talking during a session, she said, “Amy, I had this really weird experience. I was walking the dog the other day, and for a few minutes, it was like all was right in the world. I had this deep sense of peace and wellness. Then I lost it.”
“Great!” I exclaimed. “You got your first glimpse of what’s on its way to you.” Cindy then went back to the same pattern of what had been happening prior to this, for quite some time. And then she got another glimpse. Eventually, she was getting glimpses more often and they were starting to be only days apart from each other. Eventually, but not without experiencing more meltdowns, her body started to “hold” or be in alignment with these glimpses more and more. In just another few months, her reference point for her own stability had kicked up a few notches. Her “new normal” was a much better-feeling normal than it had been in the past, and the glimpses kept coming. When we stopped working together, it was because Cindy knew she only had to keep moving forward in the way we had been together. Her good days now outnumbered her bad. And the meltdowns? They still show up sometimes, but she works through them, imagining that each one allows space in her experience for another, or longer, “glimpse.”
It is so very common to be moving forward and then suddenly feel like you are back at a low again, continuing in this pattern during the entire healing process until the next dip happens. Actually, doesn’t life sometimes go like this, too? This is the healing pattern that most people resonate with, though: up, meltdown, up, meltdown, and so on—but eventually the “up” holds. Hitting a low does not in any way mean that you are starting over. Healing can be just like climbing to a peak. It’s likely that you will stumble at times as you climb, but you will get back up and continue on. Great things await.
Pattern B: Physical and Emotional Retracing
Retracing is a concept that I really started to come to understand, although somewhat hesitantly, during my time in India. Chiropractic, homeopathic, and naturopathic practitioners recognize and acknowledge this concept, but Western medical practitioners rarely do. Some people say this is because mainstream medical approaches rarely produce retracing reactions.
The retracing process is essentially one of a disease reversing itself—and it’s not always fun. It consists of retracing time periods from the past (and the symptoms that went with it) until the individual reaches the point from which they started.
While healing, it’s possible that you will “retrace” or experience symptoms that have not been present for months or even years. This can be so confusing, and can leave you feeling like you are getting worse or developing some new problem. But often these symptoms are actually a process of retracing the several stages through which the disease manifested. To many doctors and practitioners, these retracing symptoms are a positive indication that the body is healing and returning to normal function.
Old injuries can “turn on” or flare again and then simply go away. Emotional states will do the same: turn on, run their course, and then simply disappear. Retracing symptoms can be related to eliminating toxic substances, healing chronic infections, healing old emotional traumas, energetic imbalances, or simply metabolic shifts that take place as a body heals and its vitality increases. Retracing symptoms can last days or weeks, though usually not more than that.
It’s very difficult to identify retracing, but I’ve found a few markers:
• Were you starting to feel better before the “crash”? When the body has more energy, it is more likely to initiate a retracing process.
• Have the symptoms occurred in the past without returning for a long time but are now popping up again? These “surprise symptoms” often come back for a last round of deep healing.
• Is your protocol one that rebalances the energy or chemistry of the body at a holistic level? As the body’s balance improves, old memories and toxicity often surface to be released.
Long before my Lyme diagnosis, I went to a neurologist who discovered that my myelin sheaths—the outer coverings of the nerves—were degenerating at a rapid pace. I was put on a therapy called IVIG, which stands for intravenous immune globulin. IVIG is a solution of concentrated antibodies extracted from healthy donors, which the recipient gets via infusion to treat disorders of the immune system or to boost immune response. During this treatment, the nearly intolerable nerve pain I was experiencing was severely heightened. My neurologist assured me that sometimes regenerating can be as or more painful than degenerating. He explained that even though the nerves were being repaired, they were being stimulated and agitated just as much as during the degeneration process. And over time, I did definitely feel like the IVIG helped, despite the feeling at the time that it was making things worse.
During my adventures in healing my menstrual issues, I recognized the same pattern. I think that my body, finally having had several good months, was strong enough to go back and heal some old, deep imbalances.
Retracing is a common part of healing, but you also want to make sure something new is not developing. Only a medical professional can determine this. Always check with your doctor or practitioner if a new symptom arises.
Pattern C: Baby Steps
This is the “slow and steady wins the race” kind of pattern. It’s the pattern where the person slowly improves over time, always moving in a forward direction toward health. They don’t deal with consistent setbacks; they simply keep chugging along in the right direction. This was certainly not my own healing pattern for most of my journey, although it tends to show up more in the “home stretch.” I’d be lucky if, for a day or two, I wasn’t confused about five different possible scenarios or explanations for my bodily chaos. But there are luckier ducks than me.
For example, I started working with Alice after the worst of her Lyme disease experience had passed, but she was far from feeling well or being able to function as she wished. She was still taking several naps a day, was unable to work more than a few hours at a time, and couldn’t take the family vacations she desperately desired. During our initial session we cleared three harmful beliefs, a process you learned about in Chapter Eight . From that day, Alice was on a baby-steps path to complete wellness. Slowly but surely, with very few major meltdowns or setbacks, she continued to improve. Within a month, she was able to naturally wean herself from naps. Within several more months, she was able to work an entire day doing the job she loved. And the first summer after we started working together, she joined her family for a hiking trip and out-hiked a few of the avid athletes! She simply needed a kick-start, and releasing those initial energetic blocks definitely did the trick.
Ease Discomfort During Processing
During and after energy work, remember that you are shifting and rebalancing. You might remember from earlier that we call this time period processing . Your body and its energy “field,” which extends far beyond your actual physical being, are simply going through an adjustment process. Not everyone feels these shifts as discomfort, or at all. However, if you should, here are a few things that will help ease the process:
• Drink extra water, as being dehydrated will make it difficult for your body’s energies to adjust.
• Take a break for a day or so from doing big clearings until your body catches up.
• Use Emotional Freedom Technique or Chakra Tapping along with the following script:
Karate chop point: Even though I feel worse right now, I choose to let this energy move through me.
Even though I feel _______ (explain how you feel), I can let my body rebalance now.
Even though I’m not feeling good, I can be okay.
Then on the rest of the points, whether you are using EFT or Chakra Tapping, tap through and just vent about how you feel. When you are ready to wrap up, do one final round on all the points, focusing on some simple positive statements, such as I can be okay , All is well now , or any other phrases that are comforting to you.
• Do some grounding (from Chapter Four ).
These practices should help get you through any rough spots and keep you moving along in a forward direction.
Helpful Reminders
I remember the days when people would say to me, “I just don’t know how you do it, Amy.” I always explained, “I wake up every day and it’s there to do.” And so it is. You just keep going. You keep waking up. You learn more and ultimately, with each sunrise, you find ways to make the doing not so scary.
Eventually you might realize you’ve been doing and surviving for a long while, more than you ever thought you could. The fact that you’re still waking up, and finding new days to try new ways of living, says you’re pretty darn good at it. When you start to see that, you’ll feel better and better. You’ll start to slowly sneak away from the struggle until one day you’ll wake up and, without even trying, it won’t be so hard anymore. You won’t be doing it. You’ll have done it!
Because I know what it’s like when feeling good seems to be lightyears away, I want you to have insights to help you be more comfortable as you go through the process. You’re setting a new and healthier pattern, one that keeps on saying to your body through redirection of the energy, “This way is better.” So practice the techniques you’ve learned throughout the book, wake up each morning, rinse, and repeat. Hopefully these final insights will provide an extra boost for you along the way.
Learn to Trust
Don’t get attached to how healing “should be” or get judgmental about the process. Our “should-be’s” create far more emotional and physical stress than the actual event that we’re “should-be-ing” about. You are where you are and that’s it. It’s happening how it’s happening and that’s that. Try to relax into how it’s all unfolding and I promise you’ll be where you want to be a whole lot faster.
Each thing you experience—in every minute, hour, and day—whether it appears to be for your benefit or against it, is part of a larger picture. It’s all necessary. See it as just that. Stop weighing how much it’s worth and just trust that in some way it’s necessary for your path simply because it is happening—even through lots of twists and turns that make it look like your goal is lost.
There is a reason for everything that happens in your life: it’s getting you somewhere good, it’s getting you away from something not so good, or it’s happening because it needs to get your attention. Trust that the universe is talking to you and trying to sidestep you into exactly where you need to be. It’s all part of the game.
During a trip to India that I took in 2009, two years after my initial trip for stem cells, something happened that was greater than anything I could have ever plotted myself. The night before my plane was to leave for home, I had terrible food poisoning (they call it “Delhi belly”). Hang on, we haven’t gotten to the incredible part yet! I was vomiting into a plastic bag, desperate for the comforts of home, yet I knew there was no way I could get on a flight. I called the airline in desperation, and they agreed to reschedule my flight with no penalty or fee.
Days later as I recovered at the hospital, a girl named Charlotte came to visit her mother, who was also a patient at the hospital. My eyes met Charlotte’s across the physical therapy room, and in a total plot twist, we fell in love.
Years after that, when my symptoms started to flood back during that trip to London, I was forced to muddle my way through the painful process of healing, having believed illness was already far behind me. This time, though, I had no doctors to rely on. I had to rely on me. And through it, I found myself, and this beautiful work that I get to share with so many people every single day. I have been happier and healthier than ever before.
In 2007 when I made the difficult decision to go to India for stem cells, I never imagined that India would turn out to be such an important part of a bigger picture—part of me meeting my now-wife and of me turning inward for my ultimate healing. I’ve seen now, countless times, that things often fall apart so they can piece themselves back together again, but in a better way—a universal upgrade of sorts.
Be Open to a Change in Your Story
This is so important that I almost want to scream it at you! It’s easy to keep telling ourselves the same old story: I don’t feel good. I still have so much fear. I’m crying all the time. My body hurts. But noticing your healing improvements requires eyes that are looking for them. Make sure your eyes are open.
Healing can show up in subtle ways and may look like one of these examples:
• You had a physical or emotional meltdown, but you bounced back even slightly better or faster than the last time.
• After you went out to do something fun, you didn’t crash for two days, but just one instead.
• You normally hold on to anger for a long time when someone hurts you. This time when you got hurt, you got just as mad, but you let it go sooner than usual.
• You get tired so easily, but now you walk with a little more pep in your step before totally crashing.
• You get just as tired, but you don’t beat yourself up about it as much.
• You just stopped and rested. (A huge sign of emotional healing is being easier on yourself, which then helps to free up energy for physical healing.)
Give Yourself Permission to Find What Works for You
A journal entry from two days before my trip to India in 2007 read: I hereby vow to heal in every way I can during this trip. I will stretch my healing boundaries and try whatever comes my way. Even the weird shit.
My kick-start eventually arrived on its own when Dr. Shroff announced she had hired a yogi to teach classes in the hospital’s physical therapy room. Everyone I knew who did yoga looooved it. The class was to be held three times a week, free to patients and their families.
Our teacher, Rohit, was easy to read instantly. He was all about the practice and absolutely no fun. Week after week, he directed us to perform our first impossible move and expected nothing less from me than to at least “try, try!” when I insisted aloud that I don’t bend that way. “Keep working on your breath. Breeeeaaath makes miracles,” he said repeatedly.
I wished I was in love with yoga. I desperately wanted to be one of those students who felt transformed on the mat, wouldn’t miss a class, and made my master proud. I was determined to allow myself to quit only after I found the joy everyone else seemed to have in this practice. One day, when Rohit finally stopped reminding me about my form and breathing, I realized I had succeeded. At the end of each session, he always proclaimed, “You are now light and free!” And surprisingly, after hearing him bark for an entire hour in his weighty Indian accent that day, I kinda did feel that way. But during the next class, I was back to dreaming of wandering the city and counting sweat droplets that were falling from my head. That’s when I decided that it was my time to exit yogaland gracefully.
Life, like yoga, is all about being okay with exactly where you are. Based on those parameters, I decided I had mastered enough of this practice. I ducked out when the class was over, proud and calm, but mostly relieved that for rest of my trip I could breathe any damn way I wanted. Yoga is amazing, I know. Rohit was dedicated and surely would have helped me become a more limber and disciplined person. But yoga is not for me. And when I became okay with that, I moved on to things that catapulted me further toward health.
Falling into a similar internal-pressure trap when I was first learning about energy therapy, I read a ridiculous number of books on energy therapy, emotional trauma, and mind-body-spirit healing. I studied every program and consumed all of the information I could find on the subjects. What I realized at some point, exhausted by that approach, was that we don’t always need more: more knowledge, more training, more searching. We just need to find what feels good to us and be with it.
If you resonate deeply with three techniques out of all of them in this book, you have enough to work with. If you resonate with only one technique, you have enough. You’ll find a way to use it for everything and be successful. It’s not about the quantity; it’s about the connection.
Never follow a path, stick with a plan, or convince yourself to agree with anything unless your soul is giving you an affirmative nod. Your healing path will be a unique one, so while you’re on your search, be open to everything, but only throw your energy into something that resonates—and know there is a deeper reason you’re diggin’ it. Or not.
Maintain a Balanced Focus
There is a learned balance that will come, in time, between making your healing important and making it your entire all-consuming focus.
Just because you know a new technique or approach and have tapped into your own power doesn’t mean this should become your life (even though I totally understand the temptation). The concept of “too much of a good thing” is true here for a couple of solid reasons.
First, with energy work, as we briefly touched on earlier, there is a processing that happens as that energy moves out of our field. Until that happens, we might not feel the full shift or improvement. This is similar to how eating doesn’t always provide instant fullness. If you just keep eating without seeing how it all settles, you’ll do much more harm than good. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of giving your body time and space to allow the healing process to happen. Remember, you are trying to create a solution, not more problems—which is precisely what you will do if you push yourself too hard.
Next, focusing too much on something you don’t want isn’t helpful, which we learned in Chapter Four in regard to the law of attraction. While being active in your healing is beneficial, making your whole life about your healing is absolutely not. Your world (activities, entertainment, and people) must consist of more than this one goal or focus.
Everyone will have a different way of shifting their focus to achieve this balance. I personally did this in a few different ways. I sometimes drank wine even while knowing green juice would surely be healthier. I watched Golden Girls marathons and B-rated movies for hours on end when I could have been meditating. I ate fettuccine Alfredo on occasion, even though I knew dairy could increase inflammation in my body. I did things just for pure pleasure or fun, because pleasure and fun are healing. What I’m saying here is really this: Don’t limit your reading list to only books about healing; keep the mindless summer reads, too. Don’t be terrified of one bite of sugar. Don’t cut yourself off from the reality of life and bury yourself further into a world you are trying to separate from. Because in the big picture, it just doesn’t make you or break you. In the big picture, giving yourself more no’s does one thing and one thing only: it creates a focus on what you don’t have. And absolutely no healing comes from that.
There, I let you off the hook. Integrate these practices you’ve learned into your life. Embrace them fully, but don’t over-focus and exhaust yourself. Find that balance.
Seek Support
Sometimes the journey can be lonely. We just want someone to understand, cry with us, or shake us out of our current rut. Sometimes we just need help getting to the next step. There is a good reason to ask for help, from either a friend or a professional, and it’s not because self-healing doesn’t work. It may be true that you can heal yourself, but everything is easier when we have a little tribe to help us. You do need to be responsible for your own journey, but you don’t have to do it alone.
If you are not working with a professional regularly, check in with yourself to see if it might be beneficial to work with one, at least occasionally. Here’s why. A professional has seen hundreds and hundreds of clients, and you’ve only had experience with, well, you. People who do this all day long have seen different patterns and issues emerge, which gives them an advantage—they can often quickly see what you can’t. Not only that, but this is an amazing way to learn how and what to apply for yourself. You will get to see how a professional unravels issues and what they do when they get stuck. You may even hear a story from their own journey that will generate new ideas for your healing.
I regularly have clients who “graduate” from working with me regularly in one-on-one sessions and then contact me for a check-in appointment here and there. They fill me in on what’s going on and share any stumbling blocks. From there, I’m always able to give them new ideas or direction they can take on their own for more healing and clearing. This gives them a great new jumping-off point and a little reassurance when they need some confirmation that they are doing just fine. Giving your power away and asking for support are two totally different things. Seeking insight, advice, ideas, and a boost will often allow you to take your healing to the next level.
If you are unable to work with a professional or are uncomfortable doing so, find someone who will help you raise your vibration and help you focus on solutions to feeling better right now. Do not ask for help from those who are struggling too much themselves and are likely to have “contagious panic energy.” If you don’t have the tribe you desire, you may need to get creative. Find people who lift you up. If you don’t have a strong support system in family and friends, look elsewhere. It doesn’t take hours of phone time; sometimes just a familiar face and a smile from a neighbor or grocery clerk can truly make a difference.
Always know, too, that you have support from angels, relatives on the other side, and more. You simply need to ask for their help. So often I would, and still do to this day, call out and ask for help from my invisible tribe. You might laugh if you are new to this idea, but they always come through.
Your support system is anyone or anything that makes you feel sturdier and surrounded with comfort. There are opportunities all around. It’s your new job to seek them out.
My Final Note to You
I am not good with endings or goodbyes. I never love writing the last sentence of a book. It often feels sad to part with it all, and by that point, I always wonder, what more of importance can I say that I haven’t already said? But there’s still something left here—words that I want you to remember in every part of your being.
This is the beginning.
Now is your time. Through this work, you get to experience who you really are and unbury yourself from who you thought you should be.
You get to—possibly for the first time—notice who you are separate from fear, this challenge, this illness. You get to discover your true purpose, which is not at all what you thought it was before. When I was at my sickest in India, Dr. Shroff said to me, “You need to find a purpose. You will heal when you find a purpose. You will heal when you follow your heart.” While I didn’t understand this at the time, and was convinced my heart had no idea where to lead me anyway, I later came to see exactly what she meant. She wanted me to have something so important to me that I would move beyond what kept me “living small.” It wasn’t necessarily the passion or the purpose that was important, but more so the distraction from worrying that I wasn’t good enough. Because I had work to do. I had places to go. I had people to meet. I had my light to shine. Dr. Shroff wanted me to connect with myself on a deeper level, and having a purpose makes you do that. However, in my delicate state, I amassed an army of internal pressure against myself, adding to my chore list: Find purpose.
I wish someone had said this to me at that moment:
When you finally realize that your purpose, and your natural-born right, is only to be happy with who you really are—whether you are a healer or a comedian or someone who smiles at strangers—you trigger a process inside of yourself that is infinitely bigger than whatever is standing in your way at this moment. Happiness is your purpose. And you will come to see, at the end of all your exhaustive searching, that your purpose has never been external. It has not been to make sure others are happy with you. It has not been to be perfect. It has been, from your first day here, to simply allow your expression without thought or hindrance. It doesn’t matter where you start, because from that place of whoever you are at the core, you will naturally expand outward into any other secondary missions you may have in this lifetime. Everything is channeled through that first insanely important purpose, which is to find yourself and stay there. It’s the spark, the impetus, that sets everything else in motion.
While we have covered massive ground in this book, all that you have learned can be boiled down to a few things that make up the formula for true healing.
You must …
• become who you really are.
• learn to be easy on yourself, and love yourself.
• trust that you can be okay, no matter what.
This may seem overly simplified, but these things will do for you what nothing else can. These are the things that will help you heal in the deepest spaces of your being.
Whether you have read this book and believe you have the power to heal, or you have read this book and aren’t quite sure yet, it’s okay. Healing takes courage and grace and a sharp turn in the direction away from so much of what you know. But it also takes a fair share of messy, crying-on-the-floor drowning in doubt. During these days, know that you are doing some of your biggest work, too. You are doing what you should have been doing all along. You are doing you . You are acting from your true authenticity, free from the filtering or stifling that you came to learn somewhere along the way. Haruki Murakami, in his book Kafka on the Shore, wrote: “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole lotta love to heal. The real truth, though, is that the only love you really need is yours. Healing is sometimes difficult and scary, but remember, you were born brave. You are ready.