Wellness Blog
With all of the fear, stress, and worry over the global spread of the Coronavirus, I’ve been thinking lately a lot about how our whole body is constantly listening to our thoughts and our beliefs. What happens on the bigger level is reflected on the micro level.
I see this come up a lot in work that I do with clients with immune issues, especially autoimmune conditions.
If we think that the world is not safe (and maybe we’ve had traumas that made us truly feel that way), then we actually see that belief and the fear it creates play out on a cellular level in the immune system.
The peacekeeper cells in the immune system, whose job it is to actually help prevent our immune system from overreacting to things and to calm down inflammation, can actually start acting like the warrior immune cells.
They forget their job of peacekeeping and start fighting things (including our own cells) and amping up inflammation.
The warrior immune cells that keep us safe from legitimate dangers (like pathogens) also tend to get extra aggressive and so the whole body is thrown into defensive mode.
When we are dealing with a health threat like the Coronavirus and there is a great deal of fear because it isn’t yet fully understood and because people are dying, it can trigger many of us to feel afraid.
We don’t know what to do to make sure we stay safe, we fear that we might die or our loved ones might die.
The problem is when we get in this fear and panic cycle, it then makes our immune system not function properly and any imbalance in our systems is not beneficial.
And you also probably have heard that stress suppresses immune function (and just that knowledge might add do your stress).
Personally, much of what I have been feeling in terms of fear and panic feels like it is coming from outside of me, from the collective consciousness.
So in this time that can feel scary, I want to encourage you to do a few things.
1) Remember that getting overly fearful is not beneficial to your immune system.
It is important to do things like be cautious, wash your hands, and do all of the things you typically do in flu season anyways. But it is not helpful to just sit in panic.
For me, I’m trying to avoid watching a lot of news and not even spending as much time on social media because it adds to my feelings of anxiety because I feel more plugged into the collective energy of fear.
2) Remember to think of things to do to boost your immune system—eating healthy whole foods (especially fruits and veggies), taking a Vitamin D supplement, getting good rest, staying hydrated, and exercising.
A healthy immune system is your best defense against things that you are exposed to. If your immune system is healthy and resilient it should fight off what you come into contact with.
3) Remember, hanging out in the energy of fear and panic is not going to help so do things like you would to address stress in general—deep breathing, meditation, exercise, and any other stress reduction tools you have, now is a good time to use them.
4) And if you are feeling a lot of fear, I’m offering a FREE group healing session focused on helping to release the fear, anxiety and panic you might be experiencing… and we will also give your immune system a nice boost too. Click here to sign up: https://heartfirehealingllc.com/releasing-fear/
A YEAR AGO, I WAS AT MY HEAVIEST WEIGHT EVER
And it wasn’t just about the number on the scale, it was how I felt in my body….
I felt sluggish and tired, my feet would ache if I was on them for very long, and I hated trying to find clothes to wear.
I felt frustrated and disappointed in myself because I was exercising regularly and eating fairly healthily yet I weighed more than I wanted to.
A few months before the first photo (at the bottom of the post), I had started working with learning more about how to rebalance hormones that regulate weight and metabolism through the tools I have in my energy healing toolbox and I KNEW deep down that this was the key to real change for me.
My weight has been a struggle for me for many years. Even as a teenager who spent a summer working out DAILY and eating healthy (not a crazy fad diet but focused on eating mostly fruits, veggies, and lean meats), I lost ZERO pounds.
I now know that the problem was that the MANY hormones that regulate metabolism (and that evolutionarily have kept us starving) were out of whack…
By addressing those issues through working with my teacher, I was able to achieve my goal of releasing 25 pounds last year and not starving myself or exhausting myself with working out for HOURS every day.
And now I’m helping others to do the same thing.
Just today I got a text from a client saying SHE LOST WEIGHT EVEN DURING THE HOLIDAYS.
If you are reading this, I hope this gives you hope. You might be doing “all the right things” and not seeing the results because something needs to be rebalanced in your body. It isn’t your fault or that you “lack willpower.”
This isn’t about fad diets, starving yourself, and spending hours in the gym every day (the first 2 things will actually further mess up your metabolism, FYI). It is about healing the root imbalances and seeing results!
If you are curious about how I might be able to help you do the same, I invite you to read about more about this work or to book a complimentary 30 minute call so we can chat. Please know that this is a process that takes at least 5-6 months but that it can bring you success if you are also willing to follow some lifestyle guidance about diet and exercise.
There are some “spiritual” schools of thought that seem to lead us to believe we should always be happy, upbeat, joyful, grateful, and only things that are positive.
And that if we feel anything less than that, well we aren’t doing our work or that we are doing something “wrong.”
Yet this constant false positivity is dangerous because it doesn’t allow us to acknowledge where we are at in the present moment and that it is part of being human to sometimes feel less than amazing.
I believe it can even contribute to things like illness when we are constantly suppressing how we feel.
We all experience up and down cycles within our emotional and mental states.
It would be unreasonable to think we should always be positive, upbeat and happy and never experience feelings of sadness, frustration, or depression.
In my own life, I have come to observe this pattern where after weeks of feeling good about life, in the flow, and happy, then I hit a low patch.
In the low, everything feels heavier, more challenging, more emotionally overwhelming. Feelings of sadness, grief, or frustration can come to the surface. The low definitely doesn’t feel so good.
In fact, right now, I am in a little bit of a low.
Yet when I start getting into thinking that I should resist the low, force myself out of it, or when I judge or blame myself for experiencing the low, that is when things get worse.
It is natural to experience this ebb and flow cycle in life and the more we push against the low, get frustrated by it, or judge or blame ourselves for feeling it, the harder it becomes to move through it.
Resisting the low or thinking negative thoughts about ourselves because of the low doesn’t honor that it is a part of our natural cycles of life AND it also makes certain feelings and emotions seem WRONG.
If you are sad and down, allow yourself to feel those feelings.
If you are frustrated and feel stuck, again allow yourself to feel those feelings too.
ALL EMOTIONS ARE JUST ENERGY.
When we give ourselves space to simply be present with what we are experiencing and we get curious about if there is a deeper meaning or message to how we are feeling that we need to examine, things can begin to move and shift in a very natural way.
When we fight the feelings or we suppress them, the energy of them often grows stronger and it becomes harder for it to dissipate.
It is only when we become stuck in the negative and spiral downwards over a longer period of time that it becomes problematic.
If, instead, we feel our feelings, whether we see them as positive or negative, and we let them show us what we need to see, that is where true healing and transformation can occur.
INSIDE I CRINGED WHEN EVERY CONVERSATION BEGAN WITH “HOW ARE YOU FEELING??”
After I was told (incorrectly) that I had leukemia back in 2004, I remember feeling like all the parts of me, all of the pieces of my identity that had existed before were gone.
The Lyn that was the daughter, the friend, the grad student, the dancer, the healthy and alive woman… all the parts of me, suddenly disappeared.
One minute all those parts of me existed and in that instant of hearing that I had cancer, it was like “poof” those parts of me were gone.
In the months that followed my diagnosis, I felt like the only part of me that was seen by anyone was “the sick person” or “the cancer patient.”
Every conversation with a friend seemed to begin with “How are you feeling?” or “How is your treatment going?”
While it was nice to know that people did care about me, it was also extremely painful to feel like I was reduced to this one identity of sick person.
I longed for all the other parts of me to still be seen, acknowledged, talked to and talked about…
It felt really lonely to be seen in only this way.
Yet I felt like it wasn’t ok to say, “You know, I’d really rather talk about something else…”
WHEN WE ARE GIVEN A LIFE-CHANGING HEALTH DIAGNOSIS, IT CAN FEEL LIKE THIS ONE THING BECOMES OUR ENTIRE IDENTITY… LIKE WE LOSE ALL THE OTHER PIECES OF OURSELVES.
And it’s painful…
Maybe you can feel how much you long to still be seen as wife, as mother, as friend, as daughter, as business woman, AS YOU.
Because this diagnosis is NOT YOU.
Let me say that again…
THIS DIAGNOSIS IS NOT, I REPEAT, NOT WHO YOU ARE.
You are still all of the parts of you that you were BEFORE you heard that diagnosis pronounced.
You might feel a bit worse for the wear, a bit more in pain or symptomatic. Yet those parts of you that seem to have vanished or be ignored are still there.
And it is totally ok (in fact, I encourage it!) for you to voice your needs and desires to talk about other parts of yourself and other parts of your life in conversations.
It is wonderful to say, “I appreciate your concern for me AND I also would love to talk about our relationship and the fun things we can do together today.”
THE LESS YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME AND IDENTITY WITH YOUR ILLNESS AND YOUR DIAGNOSIS, THE HAPPIER AND MORE WHOLE YOU WILL FEEL AND THE EASIER IT WILL BE FOR YOUR MIND, MIND AND SPIRIT TO HEAL.
When we don’t let ourselves become identified as this diagnosis, when we still acknowledge all parts of ourselves, we empower ourselves to feel more whole and alive.
And that is a powerful fuel that can be used to heal and transform your health.
In the past couple blog posts, I have talked about recent studies that have shown that stress isn’t always dangerous to our health and well-being. If you haven’t read the past 2 posts, I suggest reading them before continuing to read this one.
In today’s post, I want to talk more about the “tend-and-befriend response” to stress and how it is beneficial.
This particular response is part of our evolution and how we banded together with our tribe to survive danger. Part of the response is about protecting children from threat, so this response is often seen more in women but it is also something that can be demonstrated by men too.
This particular response helps to decrease fear and increase hope. It activates activity in areas of the brain to make you smart, brave, and social.
Through the activation of oxytocin, we have more empathy, connection, and trust and fear in the amygdala becomes dampened so we can be courageous. Through the activation of dopamine, we become more motivated, optimistic and fear is also dampened. Through the activation of serotonin, our perception is enhanced, our intuition is heightened, we have more self-control, and our awareness is enhanced to help us make smarter decisions.
So how can you activate this particular response when you are feeling stressed?
You can reach out and help others, give someone support or take time to listen to them. Practicing random acts of kindness or donating to those in need are great ways to activate this response!
Another way to tap into this response is to focus on goals that are bigger than yourself when you are feeling stressed. For example, in a job interview, instead of focusing on your individual goals for wanting this job, think of how this job will let you help your community, what kind of change you’d like to create through this position,
Again, to learn more about this other stress response, I highly recommend reading Dr. Kelly McGonigal’s book “The Upside of Stress.”
And if you are struggling with stress and need some support around lowering it, I encourage you to book a free consult call with me so we can chat or to try one of my 30 minute quick support healing sessions to see how you can begin to lower your stress level and shift into these other stress responses NOW.
In my last post, I shared a little bit about new research that has shown there isn’t just 1 stress response like we all have believed for years but instead there are 3 different stress responses, including “challenge response” and “tend-and-befriend response.” If you haven’t read that post first, I suggest you take a quick read of it before continuing.
In this post, I want to dive deeper into the “challenge response” to stress and how you can begin to tap into it.
This particular stress response is ideal for situations that require us to perform under pressure, like an athletic event, public speaking, an exam, or some type of performance.
The challenge response gives us energy, focus, and other resources to succeed, it elicits peak performance, and it helps motivate us into action.
Yet if you’ve been in one of these situations like where you have had to speak in public or you are getting ready for a big athletic event, you might notice that in the past you have felt the typical “fight-or-flight response” kick in…
So how do you make sure you can access this response when you need it?
One way to tap into this mode is to consciously make an assessment of your skills and resources to face the task ahead.
You can ask yourself how hard the task will be, do you have the skills, strength and courage to do what’s required, and if there is someone who can help you face the challenge.
When you do this, if you can realize you have the skills and resources needed and remember similar situations that you have faced with success, you will typically be able to find your entry into “challenge response.”
Another helpful thing to remind yourself of is that your stress response is actually an asset, not something harmful. Tell yourself that your anxiety and racing heart are actually bringing more oxygen to your brain, that it is giving you more energy for your task, and more strength and focus to do what you need.
The research of Dr. Kelly McGonigal actually showed that when participants in a study were told this message that stress was supporting their brains and their abilities, no negative health impacts of stress actually showed in their bodies.
This new understanding of stress is another beautiful example of how our beliefs and our mindset have a powerful impact on our health.
If we believe the old paradigm that stress is dangerous or can kill us, it pushes our bodies to respond with the classic “fight-or-flight response.” If instead, we see stress as something that is supporting us in taking on a challenge, our bodies will respond differently and not be negatively impacted.
To learn more about this other stress response, I highly recommend reading Dr. McGonigal’s book “The Upside of Stress.”
And if you are struggling with stress and need some support around lowering it, I encourage you to book a free consult call with me so we can chat or to try one of my 30 minute quick support healing sessions to see how you can begin to lower your stress level and shift into these other stress responses NOW.
For years, many of us have heard the idea that stress is bad for us. You may have even heard that stress can kill you.
This idea definitely has some basis in reality, as stress can contribute to things like high blood pressure and heart disease, which can cause sickness and even death.
However, in the past decade, new research has come out supporting the notion that stress doesn’t always have to be bad for you and that in many cases, believing it is “dangerous” is part of the problem.
One of the key components of this new research is that there are actually 3 different stress responses, not just the “fight-or-flight response” we all think of.
With this new paradigm there is also the “challenge response,” which helps to prepare our bodies for situations where we need to perform under pressure, and the “tend-and-befriend response,” which drives us to connect with others and use the power of community when under threat.
These 2 other types of responses activate different hormones and neurotransmitters in our bodies than the “fight-or-flight response” does.
The “tend-and-befriend response” helps to produce oxytocin to help us connect, empathize, and trust, to produce more dopamine for motivation, optimism, and decreasing fear, and more serotonin for enhanced perception, intuition, and awareness.
The “challenge response” allows the body physiologically to respond like we are exercising, rather than running for our lives. This puts less stress on the heart as our blood vessels stay relaxed, our heart beat is actually stronger, and each beat pumps more blood. In addition, different hormones like DHEA help the brain learn stress resilience rather than becoming more sensitized to future threats.
In future posts, I will be sharing more about these 2 other types of stress responses and ways that you can start to shift out of “fight-or-flight” and instead use “challenge response” or the “tend-and-befriend” response.
Sitting in a room filled with hundreds of people there to see him was powerful. I was initially struck by just how amazing it is to live in a place that hundreds of people would buy a ticket and spend a day hearing such a thought leader!
The day was focused on the topic of “Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon” (I highly recommend you check out his book with the same name!). Dr. Joe shared stories of people who had healed themselves from conditions like Stage 4 cancer that doctors said was terminal or a condition that caused partial blindness and resulted in a woman losing her driver’s license, her job, and her independence (again deemed “incurable” by Western medicine).
These examples were mind-blowing, even to me. I work in the field of healing and transformation and I witness amazing things like clients going off of medications for chronic illness and having more energy than they’ve had in over 20 years and yet the possibilities that Dr. Joe revealed through his stories were incredible.
Are You Living in the Present Moment?
For much of the day, Dr. Joe talked about how many of us spend much of our time living from subconscious programming. We wake up in the morning, begin thinking the same thoughts, go through our same routine (get up, make coffee, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work, etc), and we are stuck living in either thinking about our past and all the horrible things that happened to us (traumas, people who wronged us, our struggles, what our parents taught us) or we are always focusing on the future (what we need to do next, how long it is going to take us to get to our goals).
Dr. Joe said “We are becoming addicted to a life we don’t even like—but at least it’s predictable.”
What we are missing is being in the present moment. It is only in the present moment that we are really PRESENT and it is from that space of the present moment that we have the opportunity to step into new possibilities that exist for us. As Dr. Joe said, “If you aren’t being defined by creating a new future, your brain is already in the past.”
Tapping Into Infinite Possibilites
Dr. Joe has travelled the world and teaches week long retreats where he works with participants to develop meditation practices that help them to detach from their bodies, their personalities, their possessions and work with different brain wave patterns to tap into the quantum field and connect with the infinite possibilities that exist to create whatever new reality (health, money, relationships, etc.) it is they are wanting to create.
One of the key parts of this process is to feel the feelings of the new reality before that new reality exists. It is in this way that we can signal our genes ahead of the environment.
He says, “To change is to be greater than your environment, and your body, and time.”
What is amazing is how at these events, Dr. Joe and his team use scientific equipment to measure participants brains during meditations and some of what is being observed is blowing scientists’ minds.
Observing My Own Patterns
Since Saturday, I’ve been spending a lot of time observing myself, observing my habits and patterns, noticing when I am checking out and going into an old habit or thought pattern. For one thing, I’m noticing how much I can get hooked into looking at my phone, checking social media, email, and more. This is one of the things Dr. Joe talked about was how for many of us, all these pieces of technology really reinforce our current identity and personality and keep us stuck in the past or future.
So now I am not looking at my phone until AFTER I do my morning meditation and am ready to shift into “work mode.” I’m noticing how when I feel bored by a situation, I tend to want to mindlessly scroll Facebook to “check out” and I’m working to curb that pattern.
I’m catching myself if I wake up in the morning and immediately jump into thinking about my schedule and all that I need to do today. And then working to bring myself back into the present moment once again. I’m excited to start working more with the meditations Dr. Joe has created and to see the transformation in my own life.
What Is Possible for YOU?
I truly believe in the power of possibility and that we can heal from any condition we currently experience but it takes discipline and changing habits and patterns of going unconscious. As Dr. Joe shared in the story of the man who healed Stage 4 cancer (with over 50 tumors in his body), it does take WORK. And sometimes we will feel resistance and not want to show up and keep doing the work but if we do, we have tremendous potential to change our lives.
]]>“We give too much authority to someone in a white coat.” – Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith
A couple of nights ago, I was watching the documentary “Heal” on Netflix (which I highly recommend you check out!) and I was struck by this quote from Dr. Beckwith. I was immediately transported back to my own experience with the medical profession during my healing crisis back in 2004.
The whole story of that journey is something that I share in my book, “You Are Not Your Diagnosis,” but in this post I’d like to hone in on this point that I find to be critical for so many people– that we give too much authority and therefore too much trust/confidence to doctors.
When I went from thinking I was a healthy 24-year-old woman who was getting ready for elective surgery to discovering in the pre-op process that my labs looked alarmingly abnormal, I was immediately cast into the realm of doctors and Western medicine. I spent close to two weeks in two different hospitals going through a battery of tests and examinations to uncover what those abnormal labs meant and what was going on with my health.
In the end, the “experts” arrived at the diagnosis of Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) and I believed that diagnosis because I trusted the medical profession. Yet over the next several years as I was told that all my lab results were looking good and yet I felt horrible (and I was turning into a walking skeleton), I knew deep inside that something was not right.
Yet despite my internal knowing that something was off, I couldn’t get my doctors to listen to me. When I would share that I still felt very ill, one of my doctors would brush that comment off with “Well you look great!” which also was not true because people would tell me not to lose any more weight because I was wasting away…
I was beginning to question my doctors and their knowledge but I was caught in a web that required me to get a referral from my primary doctor in order to see a new hematologist and for several years, my primary doctor reassured me that the current specialist was “a great doctor” despite my own experience that he was, in fact, anything BUT that.
It was only after I left graduate school and got medical insurance through a job and therefore got a new primary doctor outside of student health that I was able to finally get the long desired referral to a new hematologist, who questioned my diagnosis at our very first appointment…
Looking back at this 15 years later, I am still angered by the fact that my doctors didn’t want to listen to me. And I’m also frustrated, on some level, that I didn’t make a bigger fuss when I knew that something was wrong.
I share my story because I believe it is one that is all too common, although it is something that we don’t like to think about. Doctors make mistakes and it is probably more common than we think about.
When I work with my clients, I am a strong advocate that THEY are in charge of who gets to treat them and be on their care team. I remind them that just because someone has the title of doctor or wears a white coat doesn’t mean that we have to blindly follow them against what we know in our own guts to be right for us.
In one simple sentence, Dr. Beckwith sums up perfectly how so many of us have become conditioned to defer to doctors as the “experts” and to discount what we feel or even know to be true based on our daily lived experience in our bodies.
If you are reading this and you feel that you are seeing a doctor who doesn’t listen to you, who brushes off your shared experience, or who you just feel in your gut is not the right doctor for you, don’t hesitate to get a second opinion or to even fire your doctor.
Since my own experiences in 2004-2007, I have fired a number of doctors for not listening to me and my concerns or because I had a knowing that they were not the right doctor for me.
We need to make this a normal thing to do… to question our doctors and to be in charge of our health and healing by choosing who is on our team (from doctors to alternative practitioners).
I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve ever felt like a doctor wasn’t right for you but not felt like it was acceptable to question them or “fire” them. Let’s start to make it acceptable to talk about this subject and begin to help all people feel comfortable in questioning medical professionals.
Losing weight has never been a particularly easy thing for me to do. Even as a teenager who was very active (doing ballet for 90 minutes three times a week), I had a tendency to gain weight more easily than many of my peers.
I remember one summer that I decided to focus on trying to lose a little extra weight and to tone up. I spent that summer eating healthy (more fruits and veggies and lean meats, very little processed food or junk food) and working out very regularly.
And yet at the end of several months, there was no difference on the scale. Zero… Yes, I had possibly gained a little but of muscle and therefore offset any weight loss but I still felt like a failure on some level.
I remember from this relatively young age wondering WHY it was so easy for some people to lose weight when I was doing all the right things and yet nothing changed.
I knew the story of my mom’s best friend who also struggled with weight her whole life and it was only when she was in an in-patient weight loss clinic eating around 500 calories a day that her body could start losing weight. That was pretty messed up, I remember thinking, but I didn’t really understand WHY that was.
Throughout my adult life, I have continued to struggle with a difficulty in losing weight. Let me just say that I do not believe in crazy fad diets, miracle pills, and things of those sort (so please don’t come talking to me about those kinds of things- because I have ZERO interest). I have always just focused on eating well and moving my body, yet nothing has changed.
In fact, in the almost 5 years since I’ve been together with my husband, I have gained more weight and I have tried several times over the past 2 years to lose the weight but once I have lost about 10 pounds, if I don’t keep up a very focused way of eating, it immediately comes back again…
About a year or so ago, one of my mentors in the BodyTalk system, Dr. Laura Stuve, started talking about how she has had tremendous success in using BodyTalk tools (which she strengthens with her own background as a PhD scientist) to help both herself and her clients successfully lose weight.
I was immediately both excited and intrigued! While I couldn’t take her hormones of weight and metabolism class when she first offered it in 2017, I put it on my wish list for 2018 and I did take that course last October!
In the class, we learned a great deal about things like:
- how traditional diets actually mess up our metabolism MORE, making it even harder to lose weight
- how the calories in, calories burned model that has been dominant for years is flawed because it doesn’t take into account the QUALITY of the calories you are eating
- how the experiences of our ancestors (like food shortages and famines) can actually affect our metabolism today, making our bodies think we also need to be prepared for food shortages
- how imbalances in the gut microbiome (that community of good bacteria in our digestive system) can contribute to weight gain or difficulty losing weight
- and so much more…
I have been diving into using the new tools I learned from Dr. Laura with a small group of clients for several months, and also I started getting BodyTalk sessions on this topic from Dr. Laura herself.
It is my intention to blog a bit and share my own journey with this process and so this is the first entry in that documentation.
Since my first session with Dr. Laura on December 30, 2018, I have already lost about 6 pounds in 2 weeks.
This isn’t through some crazy restrictive diet but instead through making a few key tweaks in what I’m eating (which was customized based on what MY specific body is requesting) and also adding more exercise into my life (with the requirement the exercise must be FUN, not something I don’t enjoy).
So I am working out now 6 days a week, many days doing NIA videos since I love dancing and this way of movement feels fun and also good to my body. I’m changing what I eat for breakfast and cutting way back on eating potatoes to only once every 2 weeks, per my body’s request. I’m eating less sugar and more fiber, again per my body’s request.
It feels good to finally be shifting this long pattern of mine, which for me actually runs back through my mom and that side of the family. I’m doing this in a healthy, balanced way, and a way that honors my unique needs, which will make it sustainable.
Through BodyTalk, Dr. Laura is helping reset underlying imbalances in hormones, the brain centers that know whether we are safe to lose weight or if we are in danger of starvation (including those ancestral patterns I mentioned above), my gut microbiome, and so much more.
I look forward to writing another update in a few weeks!
And if this is an area that you are interested in exploring support and healing for yourself, reach out as I’m launching this as another focused offering of my work. I truly believe that losing weight shouldn’t have to be hard, require starving ourselves (that actually won’t help you lose weight), and it isn’t “your fault” if you’ve tried things and haven’t been successful. I’d love to help you have a different experience.