The Journey of Self-Healing

What is the Deeper Vitality Health Curve?

We started out perfect in every way. A guiltless bundle of light energy placed in a body and delivered with nothing but hope. Whether we were born physically healthy or not, we have the potential to live life with full vitality.

As we go through life, things happen to us, physically, mentally, and emotionally that traumatize us.

You injure your shoulder or your knee in a sports activity, you were teased by your peers when you were in middle school or there were some other traumas that you went through in your life.

That is the nature of living….

If we deal with them at the time, we stay in good health and therefore have vitality. The reality is we aren’t given the tools to navigate these happenings as they happen. We think we have dealt with them or put them away, or healed from them, but in fact they linger.

As we have traumas or injuries that we do not deal with, our body, mind and spirit develop less vitality and end up on the right side of a bell curve, where we are managing our health, but are not truly well and vital. We call this dis-ease.

If we have even an ounce of self-awareness, we try to repair ourselves, often through symptom chasing, like using medication, visiting the doctor, seeking alternative therapies like chiropractic, acupuncture, massage therapy, physical therapy, going to yoga, or the gym, or any other number of treatments.

These treatments are great and very helpful in moving you towards wellness. If you’ve found success in one or all these treatments, you have succeeded in the first step of self-healing, and that is active self-care.

For many of us, however, we find some pillars of progress, but fall back into old habits, old aches and pains return, and we learn to live with it. It’s just our new normal. I like to call it, The “I’m Not Twenty Anymore” game, or “The That Used to Work Fine Yesterday” game. The process of aging will get us all, but we can travel back through our physical and emotional traumas and reach a deeper sense of comfort. And we don’t even have to know what the origin of that original discomfort was!

You know her, the successful acquaintance that is so successful in her life, a seemingly great job, physically fit, glamorous vacations, and fancy events fill their social media profiles. This is the plastic world we associate with our happiness, and our reality, (and none of us post about the bad days, or our inner struggles). Just look at our kids, glued to their phones and asking a search engine to tell them something as opposed to real research. Critical thinking is gone, a casualty of technology.

Run faster and you will be successful. Don’t cry and toughen up if you want to be successful. Rub some dirt on it and move forward! It’s so frustrating to watch the cycle of dis-ease in motion, but all of us do it. I do it.

We don’t want to believe that our medical doctor isn’t our knight in shining armor, and that our therapist isn’t our guru, and your spouse can’t fix it. The fact is, no one is coming to save you. OUCH!

The only way to feel better, and create the life you deserve is to walk back through your journey yourself, but man that sounds horrible, doesn’t it?

Meet the Deeper Vitality Health Curve.

The top left side is our birthday, happy birthday!

Wellness: Even if born with some form of disease or physical or mental disabilities, we are born as pure light energy, pure hope, and beauty. We don’t have any of our own self designed imperfections, just pure energy. Science has begun to show evidence that there is a possible genetic component to embodied trauma we are born with. Meaning, it is possible to show up on this earth with the trauma of our ancestors embedded in our DNA/RNA.

The depth of this research warrants another blog post about it specifically, but I can say that I have had this experience myself, and I have seen it in clinical practice. Sometimes brushed aside as a predisposition to something, addiction, or a personality trait, those of us that suffer from anxiety, depression, or chronic pain can be suffering from something that happened to our parents or grandparents.

I’m not talking some sort of woo-woo past life stuff here, I’m talking about the ability of our bodies to physically change on a cellular level based on life trauma. So, if your grandfather, for example, is a war veteran, his physical and emotional trauma suffered during those times can be passed down through RNA changes into your parent, and their now altered RNA is passed on to you. That’s fantastic, on all levels.

Enter the elements of living your life: As the bell curve starts to ascend, we are experiencing life as a human, with all of it’s ups and downs. Chronic stiff neck from a fender bender at age 18, carpel tunnel from a repetitive work task, chronic headaches from god only knows what, troubled sleep from real life emotional stress, and then fatigue sets in.

We sleep less, work harder, rub more dirt on it and try to get ahead. What we are doing is boarding the train to sickville. Our 20’s and 30’s are vibrant times of emotional and physical growth, and we are ill-equipped to deal with it. Such it is being human after all.

So the pile gets bigger and bigger, and our body can take only so much, and it being as intelligent as it is, it begins giving us symptoms, signals to stop and heal ourselves.

Ignore the Signs and Pay the Price, should be the name of the top of the bell curve. It often isn’t until we hit bottom that we seek help. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Now we have real physical manifestations of our injured beings to deal with. We are sick, but we press on. Get the promotion, get the house, get the family, get that vacation, get sicker.

Take the Pill. Coming down that curve we try everything to elevate the symptoms of dis-ease. All of them are well intentioned and fantastic remedies on their own.

Medications, physical therapies, mental therapies, doctors, gurus, and meditation retreats. We chip away at the dis-ease so we can press on, keep going. But look at that journey we’ve already been through, look at the timeline. Birth, to trauma to sick to remedy. But we aren’t any better off for it. We are still tired, still jealous of our acquaintance with the perfect life, but now we have kids and a career, and we just want to get to a point where we can rest. We want to be dis-ease free and are in a constant state of managing our health.

I say this as an absolute truth.

Vitality is NOT the absence of pain.

Read it again and take a minute.

I saw the effects of people managing their health on the far right of Graph 1 every day in my clinical practice. I developed other treatment modalities to try and help people through why their pain levels were not going down, and yet new symptoms were cropping up.

I added nutritional, reiki, and meditation components to my practice, trying desperately to help people help themselves through this cycle of dis-ease. Nothing brings me more discomfort than seeing a regular patient present with new, and worsening symptoms of disease, like cancer, heart trouble and other disfunctions.

But you, and they, can get back to the left side of that bell curve. It’ll be a little bit of work, and there is no pill for it. You can self-heal. You can learn to use breath work to reset everything from your grandfathers RNA to your envy over someone else’s life.

And literally all you must do is freaking b r e a t h e.

When you are searching for vitality in your life you work back through those traumas that you have experienced and clear them out. Putting you back onto the left side of the bell curve in the healthy state. Breath work allows you to work through all trauma and heal. It’s not hard, you are literally just breathing.

Now start to the right on Graph 2 and read backwards through the steps. These are the same as the steps in Graph 1, except you’ve added a regular breath work practice to the process. You are in control of this, you are your knight in shining armor. YOU are coming to save YOU.

You may feel worse before you feel better, as you see at the peak in Graph 2, because you are really unraveling the deepest components of why you were in dis-ease. But you don’t have to know what all those components are, the breath work will dislodge them for you.

All you must do is show up and freaking breathe.

You can still do your yoga, exercise, reiki, acupuncture, chiropractic, whatever helps the symptoms as you heal, but at the core it is your breath work that will be the ship in the water. It will carry you through and see you back to the other side.

Vitality is NOT the absence of pain.

Vitality is feeling worthy, being grateful, and living a life of intent.

- Dr. Jill Paisley