When you begin a healing journey it’s typically because you have a problem (usually a symptom) that you are trying to find a solution for. Maybe you’ve tried conventional medicine without any relief, maybe you want to try other things before you go down the conventional medicine route. Either way, you’re in a place where you may be struggling a bit, which is totally understandable. This can often lead to a lot of research and experimenting, which is usually a good thing! It’s how you can figure out what works for you, but a couple of things I’ve seen hold people back on their healing journeys in my practice over the years are the following:
Let me dig into these a bit more to provide some context.
We live in an age where you can learn pretty much anything online. It’s truly amazing and allows us to have a wide range of resources at our fingertips. I love online learning both professionally (my Master Your Minerals course is my business baby) and personally. I feel like whenever I want to learn how to do something I will search for an online course to do so. It’s such a gift. the other part of having information at our fingertips is social media, which can also be helpful but can sometimes create more confusion. For example, say you learn something from an account you respect online and start implementing it and notice you are seeing improvements in your symptoms. Then a few weeks later you read the exact opposite from another account and you start to question what you’re doing. The progress you’ve made starts to be forgotten and you go down another rabbit hole. A lot of the time because we don’t have the full picture it can be hard to know what is best for you. This is where taking ownership and trusting yourself comes into the picture. We are often looking to others to tell us what to do when it comes to our health, but we all have the ability to make thoughtful, informed choices if we just slow down a bit. If we zoom out, think about our health history, any recent testing we’ve had done, what our current stress looks like, etc. it’s usually much easier to know if something might be a good fit or not. The other important thing to keep in mind is that an Instagram post is not meant to give you health advice. It might be sharing some generalized advice or something that worked really well for one person, but it may not be a good fit for you. Living in the age of information is great but it can also lead to information overload. Trusting yourself and that no one knows your body like you do can help you sift through that information.
This is a tough one because I understand that symptoms can be debilitating and have a huge impact on our quality of life, but hear me out! What I often see on the healing journey is that someone may experience an improvement in some symptoms and completely resolve them all together for a certain amount of time. Then down the road, they may start to pop back up or maybe they are experiencing some new symptoms and think they failed and their body isn’t as healthy as they thought. This is the search for perfect health and is an unattainable goal. Why? Because symptoms are how our bodies communicate with us. If we never had any symptoms, we wouldn’t know what our bodies need. Having symptoms pop up doesn’t mean you aren’t working hard enough on your health, it’s a sign that your body is telling you that you need to pay attention to a specific area. For example, if you start to experience more fatigue it’s often a sign we need to slow down and see if our needs are being met. Many of us are living in a way that goes beyond what our bodies have the capacity for. Working really hard, working out hard, having a big stress load and very little downtime, paired with little time in the relaxed state is a recipe for fatigue and eventually burnout. Instead of getting thyroid blood work, hormone labs, adding in more supplements, etc. it is probably time to take a look at your lifestyle and see how you can start to support your body and fill up that energy bank. If we are always taking energy out and never putting it back in, we will eventually hit a wall. Remember, symptoms are communication–what do you think your body is asking for?
Why does getting curious help both of these? It asks you to wait and observe before you make a decision. If a symptom keeps popping up and is bothering you, where do YOU think it is coming from? Don’t Google or start searching Instagram. If you really take a minute to reflect on it, I bet it will come to you. Something may pop into your head of the last time you experienced this and maybe you start to see a pattern. Explore that. Same with information you’re reading online. Say you are going through an online course and you read something that just doesn’t feel right to you. That’s okay! Why doesn’t it feel right? Follow that, explore it, and if at the end of the day, if your gut is telling you not to do it, please listen to that.
While it’s so amazing to learn from experts and that can bring a lot of relief and clarity on healing journeys, the most important voice to listen to is yours. I hope this encourages you to get curious and look within more.
I also have a great podcast episode where I discuss the ups and downs of healing that you may find helpful, you can find that here!
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