To Heal You Need to Be Who You Truly Are

I’ve been spending my mornings like this: I get up, I kiss Nate, I fill a French press with steaming hot mint tea, and I sit at my desk. I spend an hour reading or writing, but mostly I work on the energy medicine practices I’m learning from Amy Shuer’s fantastic book, How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can.

I make sure I keep the door closed because it all looks a bit crazy: Amy has me tapping on my chakras to free constricted energy, holding my thymus gland while I release unprocessed events buried in my subconscious, and chanting feel-good mantras louder and louder and louder. I do whatever the hell Amy tells me to do, because her book is gold and contains some of the most important insights on healing I’ve ever read .

Amy also had Lyme for ten years and observed that when all the hardcore physical medicine doesn’t work, maybe the body alone isn’t what’s causing the illness. Using a grounded, practical approach to energy medicine, she healed herself. I’m also finding energy medicine to be a big missing piece of my puzzle.

When I got to the part of the book when she explains the one thing you MUST do for all the tapping and woo woo to work, I noticed I resisted her key message: “To permanently and completely heal, you need to be who you truly are. You must be the real you. That means to love, accept and be yourself no matter what. No light-dimming or living small allowed.” 

I’ve been thinking about that long and hard, using my brain to try to untangle the mystery of it as if it’s a ball of headphones tangled at the bottom of my purse. That’s actually how I try to solve most of my problems: analyze, make lists, poll friends, hire experts, Google it.

My husband will tell you that I have a bit of a what-do-you-think-I-should-do problem. It tends to be my preference to trust the guidance of others over myself. My morning energy medicine work has me looking more closely at this impulse.

But, dang it, I just love to be supported. I can’t help it. My friend Sarah once jokingly called my team of doctors and practitioners my “staff,” -- though I like to think of them as the trusted individuals who sit at my “healing roundtable” - something I created after I got the idea from by Dr. Lissa Rankin. These are the professionals and friends I’ve intentionally gathered to field questions, try out experimental therapies, and bring me across the finish line to health.

I am completely confident that you can’t heal from any complex chronic disease without a trusted circle of love and professional support - as long as you’re always the one at the head of the table with the final word. My trouble is that I love to outsource so much that I can easily lose touch with my inner authority. 

I’m pretty sure I stopped trusting myself somewhere in between growing up in a culture that praised me for being a rule-following good girl and being told over and over again there was nothing wrong with me while I felt like shit. 

Becoming more of me is requiring me to burn away those parts that seek input when I already have the answer within me. Author Glennon Doyle calls it “the knowing.” She writes: “I understand now that no one in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends - they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live with my gifts and challenges and past and people…. This life is mine alone, so I have stopped asking people for directions to the places they’ve never been.” Amen.

As I weave together the discipline of owning my instincts with the teachings of energy medicine, I’m discovering just how poetic the body’s use of metaphors can be.

In energy medicine, hip pain is linked to not moving forward in life. Because our hips carry our lower body forward, they can also be connected to a fear of not being able to support and trust ourselves in our pursuits. And as it happens, I’ve been seriously debilitated with hip pain for about five years. 

My specialist sees the hip pain as a Lyme infection entrenched deep in the tissues of my hip, but I’m not looking past the energetic metaphor going on here. Stuckness has been the name of the game for me. Pain and low energy have epically derailed my attempts at a “proper career,” and that’s left me feeling chronically purposeless because, like most of us, I was conditioned to believe that not working a big important job means not being a valuable contributor to society.

So, here’s my energy medicine prescription for myself: Lindsay, to be who you really are, you’ve got to trust that you always know the next right thing to do. 

Will that heal the hip pain? Maybe. But it does have the power to change the course of my life, to unstick me, to make me more of me - and that feels absolutely thrilling.