It has been sitting with me for a while now to write a post about my healing journey. This has been an entwined emotional and physical healing journey. I say entwined because I believe my physical dis-ease was an expression of the emotional trauma I was holding in my body, and I believe this is usually, if not always, the case for everyone.
My Experience of Multiple Chemical Intolerance
In 2013, after a period of extreme prolonged stress, I began experiencing some very distressing health issues. My face, neck and arms became covered in hot, burning, itching rashes. My nails began to come away from the nailbed, and my teeth became loose. I started experiencing high level brain fog where it was like I knew the words I was searching for were in my brain, but I couldn’t seem to access them, and I often couldn’t remember common words or the names of people I knew really well. Through research and elimination diets I finally worked out that I had developed multiple chemical sensitivity to salicylates, amines/histamine, sulphur, glutamates, gluten, eggs, soy, corn, fructose, citric acid and dairy. I could count on my fingers the small number of foods that I could actually tolerate eating or smelling. Other issues began to appear such as abdominal bloating, blurred eyesight, muscle aches, painful and often debilitating joint swelling, high levels of fatigue and episodes of spiraling anxiety. Eventually the fatigue became ongoing and I felt like I was dragging myself out of bed exhausted each morning, struggling through the day to care for my children and husband, longing for the time when I could fall into bed in the evening, only to repeat the same cycle day after day. Eventually, I also became quite depressed.
I wrote a book about what I found helpful to physically (and emotionally) manage these health concerns as I wanted to try and help other people who also experienced these chemical sensitivity issues. It is called Free to Eat. In the book I state: “As far as I am aware for most of us there is no cure for our salicylate/sulphur/amine/glutamate sensitivity and there is no quick fix.”
A few nights ago, approximately nine years later, I went out for dinner and freely ate whatever was served in the delicious sampling menu that we ordered. That may not sound like much, but anyone who has experienced salicylate sensitivity and histamine intolerance will understand what a big deal that is. Am I cured? I’m going to say yes. How did it happen? – I learned to love myself and focus on what I felt good about.
How Letting Go Led to My Healing
Your physical and emotional body naturally align with the universal energy of love and wellbeing when you let go of resistance with your mind. You do not have to try to heal yourself. Simply focus on what you feel good about and do things you love. Fun, laughter, play and connecting to nature are the best paths to both emotional and physical healing.
I know it may sound simplistic, but this is how my healing happened. I had immersed myself in trying to learn about human health and with finding out how to cure myself. Then one day, I realised that all my research was actually creating stress and fear in me as I was overanalysing everything. I was tying myself up in knots in my head from all the information that I was focusing on. One day I had this “aha” moment that I did not need to be well (fixed) to be happy, as in I did not need to put my life on hold until I was better and healed. I decided to stop focusing on getting well, and to start focusing on being happy.
I gathered up all my health books and gave them away and decided to simply focus on feeling good in whatever way I could. It was from this that I launched my website “The Feel Good Life Club” (this has since evolved into my current website), and began the practices which I outline in my book 10 Steps to Happiness. I began to focus on tuning into my own intuition and my body’s wisdom, rather than doing too much external research.
It is a common human tendency to want to fix whatever is wrong rather than focus on what is going well and what we like. It is an expression of the human negativity bias I think; a learned survival behaviour which is based in fear.
Healing Happens from the Heart
The concept I am talking about here is not one of false positivity where you avoid dealing with issues, hurts or uncomfortable emotions. Rather I am talking about shifting your mindset to one of acceptance and love. It is a shift from trying to understand and fix things in your head, to letting them heal from your heart.
This is in line with the research of Dr Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton and the HeartMath Institute, and the teachings of people such as Katherine Woodward Thomas, and Gay Hendricks and the collective consciousness that is called Abraham Hicks.
Because our heart is emanating a coherent field when we open it, we start feeling less polarized, less analytical, and less anxious. The result is that we begin to see life through a different prism. That frequency generated from elevated emotions carries information, so as an example, when a person changes their energy and starts laying down the thought of health or wealth, that thought of health or wealth can be carried on that frequency. The thought of health can’t be carried on the frequency or emotion of suffering because they are different frequencies, thus they carry a different set of thoughts and information.
. . . if your energy is high enough, then your energy can literally entrain someone else to an elevated frequency. We now see this regularly when we do coherence healings at our workshops, resulting in instantaneous, miraculous changes from blindness to perfect sight, deafness to hearing, tumors disappearing, stage-4 cancer going into remission, Parkinson’s Disease, MS and Lupus disease reversing, shifts in kidney functions (such as kidney failure), changes in the brain, and so on and so on.
Dr Joe Dispenza – Heal Yourself, Heal Others Pt 1 and Pt 2
The Healing Power of Self-Acceptance
The first book I read when I began this stage of my healing journey was Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life. While I think this book has much to offer, the concept of repeating affirmations hundreds of times a day felt overwhelming to me at that point in my life. The next book I read was Gay Hendrick’s book Learning to Love Yourself. The process he describes for loving yourself for whatever you are feeling is so simple, but has been, and still is, one of the most healing practices I engage in. I describe how to do my version of it in my book 10 Steps to Happiness.
Katherine Woodward Thomas also teaches a version of this concept, from the perspective of inner child work and the embracing of the traumatized parts of ourselves with the part that can access higher love and wisdom (I talk about one of my healing experiences where I intuitively did this in my blog post: Where Does Our Fear of Doing Something Wrong come From?)
The illusion is that maybe one day we’ll heal ourselves and then we’ll get to have what we want. One day I’ll get to the bottom of this, and then I’ll have love. That’s not accurate. If you had a disturbance in your childhood where you felt unloved, unwanted, unsafe, you’re kind of always going to be healing from that. . . That’s okay. What we want to do is stop identifying with the self that we formed in response. . . so that we can actually generate our lives outside of that story, and we can actually begin to identify with our self of the future. We cannot create the future from the self that we formed in response to trauma in the past. Where we want to start to place our focus, is on the future that we’re committed to creating.
I think that the truth is, that a lot of our unhappiness that we’ve been trying to figure out and get to the source of, by going and looking at what happened to us in the past, we think that’s the source of our unhappiness, of the frustration of what we don’t yet have in our present. I think that actually the source of our unhappiness, is we’ve been out of integrity with the future that’s wanting to happen.
Where we are most out of integrity with the future, where the gap is most severe, is where we’ve been really anchored in, and overly identified with, the self that we created in response to some kind of, usually relational, trauma.
Where we want to go, is to begin to recognize that the part of us that is holding this story, is a younger self, and that beliefs are lodged in the body. . . They’re in the energetic field of the body. They’re in the emotional default place that we go to. A lot of them are not even named yet, they’re outside language, particularly if you formed that consciousness before you had language.
What happens when we get triggered is that we default to overly identifying with that story.
One of the reasons we haven’t been able to evolve is because we haven’t bought that part of ourselves into relationship with the part of ourselves that is deeply wise and trustworthy and has a lot of skills and a lot of capacities. . . A major part of evolving beyond beliefs has to do with the relationship you have with your self; in your ability to connect your resourceful self, your trustworthy self, into relationship with your younger wounded self.
Katherine Woodward Thomas
The Key to Life is to Feel Good
It was through the teachings of Abraham Hicks that I was introduced to the magic power of feeling good.
Reach for the thought that feels better, and allow the natural well-being that is yours. You always have the power to choose which thought to follow. . . Choose the one that feels best so that you place yourself in the vibration of that which you desire.
There is nothing for you to go back and live over, or fix, or feel regret about now. Every part of your life has unfolded just right. Everything is unfolding perfectly, and as you relax and find ease in your attitude of trust knowing that well-being is your birth-right, amazing things will happen.
Look for good things about where you are, and in your state of appreciation, you lift all self-imposed limitations – and all limitations are self-imposed. . . Never mind what is. Imagine it the way you want it to be so that your vibration is a match to your desire.
Whatever you’re thinking about is literally like planning a future event. When you’re worrying, you are planning. When you’re appreciating, you are planning… What are you planning?
Upon waking, let your first thought be ‘thank you.’ . . A belief is only a thought you continue to think; and when your beliefs match your desires, then your desires must become your reality.
You’re not manifesting, you’re creating the environment that allows the manifestation. Wanting to feel good must be your highest priority. Once you feel good, everything you are looking for comes. You are not looking for an answer or a solution, you’re looking for a pleasant path.
When you feel good, you are close to your true essence, your spirit, the full beauty of who you are.
Abraham Hicks
Your Body and Soul Know How to Heal Themselves
There is still an aspect of ‘work’ to this, and it is still a practice and a process. However, the work is not understanding and fixing, the work is choosing to be consistently deliberate in where you are setting your focus, and in stepping into vulnerability and love. The work is trusting that you actually already have all you need within you, and that the universal energy will guide you to what you need and want; trusting that when you ask the answer is given.
Today I broke the glass.
I literally broke a beautiful glass bottle of essential oil perfume that a dear friend had made for me. It was filled with love, little obsidian stones, and sensual oils, all to support my root chakra.
Safety.
I felt a sense of sadness as one of my favourite grounding essences dropped to my bathroom floor and shattered before me. I was observant how quickly my heart came back to a place of calm and understanding of it is what it is. It happened for me.
I felt into the learning, the lesson, the message from the Universe. Everything in my morning had moved so gracefully, so easily and abundantly and with such deep gratitude.
As I sat deeply with my heart and listened for the message, it downloaded.
Whilst I have been so grateful for the tools, the learning, the people, the physical things that have helped and supported my journey, in particular over these last 7 years of deep personal growth – the heart centered people, the crystals, the essential oils, the breathwork, the yoga, the affirmations (movement + mantra), the new home, the new beginnings – I realised that these are all things and tools – whether material or not, they are outside of me.
Lisa Tregenza – Intune Yoga
I felt into my heart and I realised that I am love and I am enough.
Also, when I say that this process was easy I mean easy in the sense that it happened naturally and often spontaneously with relative ease.
How to Quickly and Easily Align with Healing – In a Nutshell:
Step into your power to choose your focus; to choose what you think about and how you choose to interpret what you are experiencing. Imagine that all topics are like sticks. If you can’t think about a topic and feel easily and unconditionally good about it, then imagine handing that stick back to the universe to take care of.
Consistently ask yourself questions like:
What feels good about this?
What do I like?
What am I thankful for right now?
How can I easily feel good right now?
Think about and do more of what makes your heart sing and light up.
Regularly engage in practices such as meditation or being in present creative flow which switch off your analyzer mind.
Choose to love and accept yourself for whatever you are feeling, because this creates healing, and reduces the resistance to alignment with wellbeing that is created by negative thoughts and feelings such as fear, regret, blame, anger and hurt.
Seek to embrace everything with curiosity and humour and love, because in the bigger picture “there’s nothing serious going on here.” (Abraham)
Have fun with it all.
Your thoughts create your reality – what do you want to create?
You have the power to choose to believe that life can be easy and good, or that it is meant to be hard and everything must be earned somehow. It’s your choice, and whatever you choose will become true for you.
It really is that simple.
PS If you want to learn more about how quick and easy healing can be when you work through your energy body rather than your physical body, then I highly recommend Jeffrey Allen’s course Duality on Mindvalley.
Header photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
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