Six Things I Did NOT Do to Heal

I’ve been working on a post about how to deal with your triggers, but it’s been a busy month, and I want to write that one more carefully. So it will come out at some future date. However, I wanted to get something posted this month. I’ve been looking at some other sites that offer guidance for mindbody healing, and I realized that even now, some of the advice I see on other sites causes me to clench up with the “shoulds.” They just speak so confidently about what we “should” be doing to heal.

So today, I want to touch on six things that I see as regular advice that I did not do to heal. (Note that this is not to say you shouldn’t do these things, but rather it’s a reminder to focus on what your body needs.)

On the contrary, early on in my healing, I adopted the F*ck It Diet. Prior to getting sick with long covid, I’d spent a decade stressed out about food, and getting sicker and sicker as more and more foods became triggers.

First soy, then dairy, then gluten, then potatoes, and then “high histamine” foods. Specifically, for me, food was associated with endometriosis, chronic sinus infections, chronic constipation, heart burn, and general discomfort throughout my digestive tract. Cutting out gluten helped the endo, but over time, more and more food triggered digestive issues and sinus infections, which I was getting multiple times a year and which would last weeks to months.

Then, with long covid, just about all foods became triggers.

I was terrified of food. This is an unhealthy state to be in. We need food to survive, and we can’t be scared of it.

Moreover, we literally cannot digest our food as well if we’re scared of it (rest-digest vs fight-flight-freeze). So, for me, a diet that encouraged me to eat what I want and when I want was a necessary component for healing. I needed to learn how to listen to my body, rather than listening to what other people said about my body.

This came with its own challenges and issues, so I don’t necessarily recommend the F*ck It Diet for anyone else. I’ll likely write more about my experiences/challenges with food and weight at a later date, but for now, the key takeaway: I got healthy without worrying about my diet.

I do tend to eat more whole foods, organic foods, and food with higher nutrients (I shop at farmers markets and participate in a local CSA), so it’s not like all I eat is junk food and fast food. But if I want to eat junk food or fast food, I do, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

I did not need a restrictive diet to heal, and I reincorporated ALL food (that I want to eat) back into my diet. My digestive tract now mostly functions as it should, and I don’t have any of the health issues mentioned above.

For a lot of people, a schedule is grounding and healing and helps you stay on track with whatever it is you’re trying to do in life. For me, every time I try to stick to a schedule, I get sick. Still. I can’t do it.

I spent a significant chunk of my healing process trying to get myself onto a schedule because that’s supposed to help us heal. I never succeeded. To be honest, I’m still trying to get a schedule going because it does seem like it would make life easier, but my efforts haven’t worked yet.

I recovered anyway. A schedule seems lovely, and maybe a schedule is necessary on your healing pathway.

But I did not need to stick to a schedule to heal.

A lot of healing programs advocate that you use certain supplements, and often they sell their own supplements. Prior to learning about mindbody healing practices, I had tried countless supplements based on recommendations from websites, health practitioners, and other sick people. None of them made me healthier, and often, my body reacted to them, and they made me worse.

Once I started realizing that all of my health problems were related to my nervous systems being out of whack, I tossed all of my old supplements, and I must have emptied out nearly 100 bottles of pills and liquids. I don’t even want to think about how much money I spent on all of those.

This is not to say that supplements can’t be useful or necessary for some healing pathways. I know people who swear that certain supplements were critical for their healing. That’s great! What matters is healing.

Personally, I did not need any supplements to heal.

Yes, sleep is important. But in order to fall asleep, and in order to get good sleep, your nervous system needs to be able to calm down. Working through all of the old, repressed emotional stuff and releasing the fear from your nervous system will naturally allow you to start sleeping more easily.

I used to have insomnia. I don’t anymore. That’s one of the many symptoms that mostly disappeared after I started doing JournalSpeak.

I discovered that, for the times I couldn’t fall asleep pretty quickly, it was because I had emotional stuff bubbling right under the surface that was keeping me awake (those thoughts keeping you awake at night are actually a symptom, and one I’ll write about more some day). I regularly did a JournalSpeak session or a meditation before bed to help me tap into whatever was ready to be released, and I almost always slept fine after that.

If I could not fall asleep and I could not deal with the emotional stuff, I stopped trying to do either. I would just watch mindless TV as late as I needed to (sometimes all night), and I would nap when I could. If I allowed the sleep resistance, then the emotional stuff simmering underneath would eventually come to the surface, and I could process it. Sometimes this meant a couple of days of very little sleep, but as long as I followed my body’s lead (which sometimes meant not sleeping), then the emotional stuff would work its way through and pass.

Sleeplessness and racing thoughts are both symptoms, and the more we try to fight them, the more entrenched they can become. So I allowed them, and I slept when I could. Now, I get as much sleep at night as I can, and I take naps when I need to (and am able to).

I do not worry if I don’t hit those 8 hours. (As I type this last sentence, I’m realizing the key word there is “worry.” If I can’t sleep, I go with it, and I don’t worry.)

The whole point of all of this is to learn to let go of all of the old voices and warning systems that told us what to do and not to do. “Don’t cry.” “Don’t get angry.” “Exercise first thing in the morning.” “Don’t gain weight.” “You have to work hard to succeed, and you have to succeed.” “I just need to get this done.” “Show constraint. Don’t let your excitement or your emotions go overboard.” And so on.

Unfortunately, when we get sick, we still have all of those old “shoulds,” but now we’ve added a huge new list of things we “should” be doing to heal.

Once I started down the path of mindbody healing, listening to my body above all else became paramount.

I never tried to tackle emotional stuff before I was ready. I never tried to have manufactured emotional releases. I didn’t even do things like pacing. I did not exercise unless movement was what my body was craving. I didn’t do breathing exercises because they could trigger things I wasn’t ready to deal with.

I also learned how to not hold back when emotions and energy were ready to course through me. I did not force myself to be restrained. Or, if I had to be restrained because I was in public, and I had an internal dialogue with myself reaffirming that I would release the energy as soon as it was safe to do so, and I always kept that promise to myself.

I meditated, I learned to feel what my body needed, and then I allowed whatever needed to happen (my only restrictions were to not hurt myself or others, but that wasn’t ever an issue).

Obviously there were times when life demanded that I do more than my body wanted, and I dealt with that, and you’ll have to as well. The point of this section is more to focus on all of the advice we get on how to release emotions or get back to our regular lives.

My experience was that I was better off ignoring everyone else’s advice and to listen to my body instead.

There are so many tips out there to sooth your nervous system, calm your vagus nerve, regulate your emotions, and so on. For the most part, my body hated all of them. And for good reason.

Although these practices can be helpful and necessary in certain situations—and they may help some people—they are often masks that help you hide the uncomfortable feelings for a time, but they do not get rid of the root cause of the illness.

I seem to have been so overwhelmed with repressed stuff that my body actually resisted many of these calming techniques. I found many of them to be more activating than helpful. I’m now grateful for that—it forced me to deal with the repressed stuff rather than continue to pretend I could keep going as I was.

I’ve been coming across more and more anecdotal reports of other people sharing similar experiences, at least with respect to these techniques serving more to repress than to help in the long term.

Unfortunately, if you have these types of conditions—long covid, ME/CFS, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and a host of other chronic conditions—you have to release the repressed emotional energies so that your body can return to a state of calm. When you release the energy, there’s nothing that needs to be soothed.

In fact, one of the most healing things I learned was how to embrace being activated and letting the emotions and energy move through me, which involved a lot of emotional releases and energetic releases (shaking, twitching, writhing, kicking, jumping, pushing, hitting, etc).

I did not try to calm myself.

Healing required learning how to reconnect to my body. All of the techniques I recommend on The Healing Pathways are geared toward helping reconnect to your body so that you can allow your body to heal on its own. This will most likely include allowing old emotions and old fight-flight-freeze energy to be released, and it will most likely include rewiring your nervous system to feel safe.

I mentioned that I did not stick to a schedule, but I should clarify that I did not intentionally create and follow a schedule. I did, however, do JournalSpeak every morning and every evening for a very long time. This was not because I was intentionally sticking to a schedule, but rather, it’s what my body wanted so that I could access and release the repressed emotions.

Techniques like somatic meditations and JournalSpeak helped me reconnect to my body so that I could allow it to work through the healing process.

There are other techniques and guides that can help you do this. I was recently introduced to the work of Sam Miller and The Great Allowing, whose approach seems to focus on using meditations to access and feel the emotional energy, rather than using JournalSpeak. That approach may work better for people who struggle with JournalSpeak, and I’ve found that her videos almost exactly describe what healing was like for me.

Ultimately, though, the key is to find the techniques that help you learn to give your body what it truly needs, rather than feeling like there are things you “should” be doing to heal.