by Amy B. Scher
• “Is my _______ (state the organ, muscle, gland, or part of the body that is manifesting symptoms) trying to give me a message?”
• “Is there a specific experience that my body is storing that is keeping me in fight, flight, or freeze mode?”
• “Do I need to forgive myself for something from my past in order to heal?”
• “Is there a benefit to this _______ (state the illness, problem, or challenge) that is making it difficult for me to heal?”
• “Is there an experience I need to heal in order to raise my body’s vibration?”
• “Is there a frequency in my body that is a match for _______ (parasites, viruses, bacteria, etc.)?” Note: This question fits in with the concept of the law of attraction. Releasing any emotional energy that is an energetic match to the parasite, virus, bacteria, etc., will help you to heal from it.
• “Am I holding generational energy that is having a negative impact on my body?”
• “Am I holding past-life energy that is having a negative impact on my body?”
• “Would it be beneficial to release energy related to _______?” Here are some possibilities for how you could fill in the blank:
• a person (family member, friend, teacher, colleague, neighbor)
• career
• school
• a place (a certain house you lived in, a city, or anything else you can think of)
• a thing (a food, a car, etc.)
Between using the Healing Tree illustration process, the additional suggested questions I’ve offered, and your own developing intuition, you have a plethora of ideas to work with. Now it’s time to learn how to encourage a new positive pattern in your body.
Create a New Routine
You now know that a huge part of healing is about releasing negative energy from our systems. As we make a dent in that work, we are slowly building ourselves back up in the way we were intended to be. Creating a routine in order to help establish a positive pattern is just as important as clearing a negative one.
Routine has never been a strong point of mine. I’m more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-flowy-skirt kind of girl. But I’ve learned that setting up some routine practices can be hugely beneficial in helping us stay on the right track. Just as I’ve always found it easier to maintain my weight than to gain weight and have to lose it later, I’ve had a similar experience with healing. It’s far easier for me to keep on top of this energy-balancing business than to allow myself to slip backward and end up with a big pile of stuff to dig through again.
I’ve learned this lesson more times than I can count—on both hands. It goes like this. I’m on a roll. I feel good. I get busy. I think I don’t need to do anything to remain in this flow of awesomeness. But then, little by little, I start to ignore small things, I overwork instead of allow myself the time I need, I skip doing things that are important to me, and so it goes. I start to feel a little rickety, and then a little more. Eventually, I always end up thinking, Wow, that would have been way less annoying if I’d just done what I knew I needed to do in the first place. Now, this doesn’t mean I’ve been perfect at this even with these reminders, and it’s unlikely you will be either. That’s completely okay. Life is about sometimes slipping up, staying up too late, reminding ourselves that we’re not completely invincible, and having too much fun, chocolate, and wine. This certainly doesn’t hurt unless it becomes the new routine. Don’t beat yourself up. Just say, “Oh, there it is again. This is very human!” Then start again.
If you have some of your own practices, like yoga, meditation, or deep breathing, then consider using them along with any bits and pieces of techniques you’ve learned in this book. These will ideally be simple things instead of, say, the entire version of a clearing technique. Many things can even be done in the shower, so there’s really no excuse not to drop them into your schedule. When you’re just sitting watching TV, see if you can work one in. During a bathroom break, take an extra few minutes to do something calming or healing. This doesn’t have to feel like a big chore or project. Your only mistake is doing nothing at all. You can do some of these before you get out of bed in the morning.
I’m all about integrating these techniques into your life instead of adding them to your to-do list. You can find a few practices and do them all together as a morning ritual, turn them into a before-bed routine, or scatter them throughout your day.
Here are a few suggestions of techniques to integrate into your day:
• Grounding
• Tracing around the eyes
• Thymus tapping
• Tapping through the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) points
• A few minutes of chanting
It doesn’t matter what your new routine consists of; it just matters that you create one that feels good to your body. This practice of creating healthy energy patterns by using a routine is like a retraining process for your body. It will return rewards far bigger than the effort.
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Chapter Twelve
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Keep Moving Forward
When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before.
—jacob riis
While my own healing journey felt erratic, with many ups and downs and in-betweens, each person’s will be different. And however yours plays out, it’s quite all right. There will be times that feel like smooth sailing, and others that feel like the healing seas are so tumultuous, you could be seasick. It’s all part of your ultimate healing.
It is often impossible to tell what’s going on inside of your body during the healing process, and it’s easy to feel like nothing is happening at all. I half-laugh, half-cringe now as I remember all of the moments when I would have traded my life savings to get one sneak peek into that body and brain of mine. I so often felt like I was looking into a clouded fishbowl trying to get a glimpse into one clear space of me to decipher what the heck was going on. And sometimes you will be that fishbowl, too.
As you move through those moments, being aware of patterns and receiving insight into what might be happening can be immensely helpful. I’m going to outline those patterns for you here.
Healing Patterns
While we need to learn to be okay with not always being able to constantly monitor our progress, there are some common healing patterns that I’ve seen over the years that will give you a little bit of inspiration to keep on keepin’ on. You may recognize one of these, or all of them, as your own. Our patterns of healing can be not only very different from each other but also different for us at different times in our own lives. Remember, by the time your body reaches the point of manifesting physical symptoms, the energetic imbalances have already been there for some time. The same idea applies to the manifestation of physical healing. The repair work often goes on for a long time before your body reaches the point of physical changes. There are many people who say that they suddenly, miraculously, healed. While healing can seem sudden, it’s usually not. It’s just that the culmination of all that has been happening appears at once.
I liken the process of healing to the growth of a baby. Imagine that a pregnant mother, desperate to see her growing baby, demands that her doctor perform a daily ultrasound as proof of the baby’s progress. It would be impossible to see the tiny day-to-day changes occurring in the baby’s growth, but at the end of nine months, the baby will have legs and arms and internal organs. Your healing is happening like this for you, too. It’s often impossible to see or feel these tiniest of shifts, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.
You are healing. It is happening—even if you can’t see it quite yet.
Pattern A: Ups, (Melt) Downs, and In-Betweens
There is one clue you can bet your money on tha
t indicates you’re most definitely healing. It’s feeling an improvement in your emotional state of being. It can be even just 1 percent. Feeling better, or sturdier, emotionally is rock-solid evidence that you are well on your way to more improvements. The key is to allow that to be enough until the physical manifestations show up.
As you move along your healing journey, you will have moments or maybe even minutes or days when you feel like you are returning to yourself or your symptoms are waning. You will have a deep sense of all being well, knowing you will somehow, inevitably, be okay. This feeling may be fleeting, lasting only seconds at first, but you’ll recognize it. This is a glimpse of what is to come and stay. You may get the glimpses only occasionally at first, but over time they will occur closer together or perhaps last a bit longer. One day you will realize that although you still have many subpar moments to count, it is as if someone is stitching together the glimpses for you into the picture of health you want. If you can enjoy the glimpses while they are present, forming no attachment to holding on to them for fear they will leave, I promise they will return. Just think of them as your angels saying, “Keep going. You’re on the right track. We’re helping to make this a full-time gig for you.”
As an example, I’ll share a story about a client I worked with for a few months. Cindy was dealing with fibromyalgia. At the beginning of each session when I would call her, I would have no idea what kind of report I would get. It seemed like things were all over the place for her. She would be feeling stable one day, and then the next day it would feel to her as if the world were crashing down. Then she’d get over the hump and return to her baseline again (which was not, by the way, feeling good). But we kept on keeping on, knowing the work would be fruitful.
One day when we were talking during a session, she said, “Amy, I had this really weird experience. I was walking the dog the other day, and for a few minutes, it was like all was right in the world. I had this deep sense of peace and wellness. Then I lost it.”
“Great!” I exclaimed. “You got your first glimpse of what’s on its way to you.” Cindy then went back to the same pattern of what had been happening prior to this, for quite some time. And then she got another glimpse. Eventually, she was getting glimpses more often and they were starting to be only days apart from each other. Eventually, but not without experiencing more meltdowns, her body started to “hold” or be in alignment with these glimpses more and more. In just another few months, her reference point for her own stability had kicked up a few notches. Her “new normal” was a much better-feeling normal than it had been in the past, and the glimpses kept coming. When we stopped working together, it was because Cindy knew she only had to keep moving forward in the way we had been together. Her good days now outnumbered her bad. And the meltdowns? They still show up sometimes, but she works through them, imagining that each one allows space in her experience for another, or longer, “glimpse.”
It is so very common to be moving forward and then suddenly feel like you are back at a low again, continuing in this pattern during the entire healing process until the next dip happens. Actually, doesn’t life sometimes go like this, too? This is the healing pattern that most people resonate with, though: up, meltdown, up, meltdown, and so on—but eventually the “up” holds. Hitting a low does not in any way mean that you are starting over. Healing can be just like climbing to a peak. It’s likely that you will stumble at times as you climb, but you will get back up and continue on. Great things await.
Pattern B: Physical and Emotional Retracing
Retracing is a concept that I really started to come to understand, although somewhat hesitantly, during my time in India. Chiropractic, homeopathic, and naturopathic practitioners recognize and acknowledge this concept, but Western medical practitioners rarely do. Some people say this is because mainstream medical approaches rarely produce retracing reactions.
The retracing process is essentially one of a disease reversing itself—and it’s not always fun. It consists of retracing time periods from the past (and the symptoms that went with it) until the individual reaches the point from which they started.
While healing, it’s possible that you will “retrace” or experience symptoms that have not been present for months or even years. This can be so confusing, and can leave you feeling like you are getting worse or developing some new problem. But often these symptoms are actually a process of retracing the several stages through which the disease manifested. To many doctors and practitioners, these retracing symptoms are a positive indication that the body is healing and returning to normal function.
Old injuries can “turn on” or flare again and then simply go away. Emotional states will do the same: turn on, run their course, and then simply disappear. Retracing symptoms can be related to eliminating toxic substances, healing chronic infections, healing old emotional traumas, energetic imbalances, or simply metabolic shifts that take place as a body heals and its vitality increases. Retracing symptoms can last days or weeks, though usually not more than that.
It’s very difficult to identify retracing, but I’ve found a few markers:
• Were you starting to feel better before the “crash”? When the body has more energy, it is more likely to initiate a retracing process.
• Have the symptoms occurred in the past without returning for a long time but are now popping up again? These “surprise symptoms” often come back for a last round of deep healing.
• Is your protocol one that rebalances the energy or chemistry of the body at a holistic level? As the body’s balance improves, old memories and toxicity often surface to be released.
Long before my Lyme diagnosis, I went to a neurologist who discovered that my myelin sheaths—the outer coverings of the nerves—were degenerating at a rapid pace. I was put on a therapy called IVIG, which stands for intravenous immune globulin. IVIG is a solution of concentrated antibodies extracted from healthy donors, which the recipient gets via infusion to treat disorders of the immune system or to boost immune response. During this treatment, the nearly intolerable nerve pain I was experiencing was severely heightened. My neurologist assured me that sometimes regenerating can be as or more painful than degenerating. He explained that even though the nerves were being repaired, they were being stimulated and agitated just as much as during the degeneration process. And over time, I did definitely feel like the IVIG helped, despite the feeling at the time that it was making things worse.
During my adventures in healing my menstrual issues, I recognized the same pattern. I think that my body, finally having had several good months, was strong enough to go back and heal some old, deep imbalances.
Retracing is a common part of healing, but you also want to make sure something new is not developing. Only a medical professional can determine this. Always check with your doctor or practitioner if a new symptom arises.
Pattern C: Baby Steps
This is the “slow and steady wins the race” kind of pattern. It’s the pattern where the person slowly improves over time, always moving in a forward direction toward health. They don’t deal with consistent setbacks; they simply keep chugging along in the right direction. This was certainly not my own healing pattern for most of my journey, although it tends to show up more in the “home stretch.” I’d be lucky if, for a day or two, I wasn’t confused about five different possible scenarios or explanations for my bodily chaos. But there are luckier ducks than me.
For example, I started working with Alice after the worst of her Lyme disease experience had passed, but she was far from feeling well or being able to function as she wished. She was still taking several naps a day, was unable to work more than a few hours at a time, and couldn’t take the family vacations she desperately desired. During our initial session we cleared three harmful beliefs, a process you learned about in Chapter Eight . From that day, Alice was on a baby-steps path to complete wellness. Slowly but surely, with very few major meltdowns or setbacks, she continued to improve. Within a
month, she was able to naturally wean herself from naps. Within several more months, she was able to work an entire day doing the job she loved. And the first summer after we started working together, she joined her family for a hiking trip and out-hiked a few of the avid athletes! She simply needed a kick-start, and releasing those initial energetic blocks definitely did the trick.
Ease Discomfort During Processing
During and after energy work, remember that you are shifting and rebalancing. You might remember from earlier that we call this time period processing . Your body and its energy “field,” which extends far beyond your actual physical being, are simply going through an adjustment process. Not everyone feels these shifts as discomfort, or at all. However, if you should, here are a few things that will help ease the process:
• Drink extra water, as being dehydrated will make it difficult for your body’s energies to adjust.
• Take a break for a day or so from doing big clearings until your body catches up.
• Use Emotional Freedom Technique or Chakra Tapping along with the following script:
Karate chop point: Even though I feel worse right now, I choose to let this energy move through me.
Even though I feel _______ (explain how you feel), I can let my body rebalance now.
Even though I’m not feeling good, I can be okay.
Then on the rest of the points, whether you are using EFT or Chakra Tapping, tap through and just vent about how you feel. When you are ready to wrap up, do one final round on all the points, focusing on some simple positive statements, such as I can be okay , All is well now , or any other phrases that are comforting to you.
• Do some grounding (from Chapter Four ).
These practices should help get you through any rough spots and keep you moving along in a forward direction.
Helpful Reminders
I remember the days when people would say to me, “I just don’t know how you do it, Amy.” I always explained, “I wake up every day and it’s there to do.” And so it is. You just keep going. You keep waking up. You learn more and ultimately, with each sunrise, you find ways to make the doing not so scary.