Reading Time: 9 minutes

I talk a lot about revolutionary healing, because I’m so passionate about it. If you have read my first two blog posts, which share my personal story and my healing journey, you may understand why that is. But you might not know what revolutionary healing is or what it looks like.

Revolutionary healing is healing at the level of the Vital Force (Life Force). It happens when we honor and strengthen our innate healing capacity, or our wholeness. It happens when we nurture a fundamental, and often radical, shift in the way we connect with ourselves, others, and the world. This kind of healing is not just for people who are sick. Healing is for everyone. We’re all capable of healing, or strengthening our wholeness, through every challenge or good thing that comes our way. Everyone’s healing looks different, yet, I know from my personal healing and professional experience that healing can’t flourish without certain foundational elements in place.

Homeopathy, coaching, and mentoring are catalysts for revolutionary healing, but it’s the work that you do within these containers and out in your life that alters the shape of your connections and fosters your continual growth and evolution. I’m a catalyst. Homeopathy is a catalyst. You are the healer.

So, what does being your own healer look like? And what are the foundational elements that fuel revolutionary healing?

Connection

You may have seen this graphic in How I Heal or on my website. It reflects my experience that revolutionary healing flourishes at the intersection of self-love, self-trust, and self-expression within the larger container of self-awareness. Each of these is not a state to achieve, rather they are evolving processes and practices that we must explore every day to foster a flourishing connection with ourselves. This kind of connection with ourselves ripples out to others and the world.

Venn Diagram for Self-Awareness

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is a prerequisite to self-love, self-trust, and self-expression. The growth and healing we’re talking about requires an awareness of underlying beliefs, thoughts, feelings, narratives, patterns, tendencies, our bodies, and especially, our innate healing capacity. For example, we need an awareness of our feelings in order to express ourselves authentically; but layers of conditioning and self-protection may make it difficult to access these feelings. Self-awareness is, at its core, a journey of self-discovery. Mindfulness, pausing for “self” check-ins, meaningful conversations, journaling, compassionate curiosity, parts work, somatic practices–these are some ways we expand our awareness and create a container within which our self-love, self-trust, and self-expression can grow.

Self-Love

Self-love is much more than saying “I love myself,” and it’s more than self-care. Self-love is a living, breathing thing that strengthens when we fuel it regularly and well. Self-love means choosing to be with all the parts of ourselves more and more, even the parts we’re not comfortable with. It means growing in our recognition of our uniqueness, our innate goodness, our inherent worth, and our wholeness. And it’s a practice that we engage with every day in the choices we make, the thoughts we think, the words we speak. It also looks like self-compassion. For me now, self-love looks like radical acceptance of my feelings and my duality (I’m both this and that), making conscious choices to honor my body’s needs, noticing negative self-talk patterns, and being the kind of friend to myself that I am to others.

Self-Trust

Equally important for revolutionary healing is trust in ourself, and especially, our body. Self-trust can be especially challenging to learn for those of us healing through chronic illness or trauma. Whether you weren’t taught to trust your feelings or your body, or you lost trust through traumatic life experiences, trust can be fostered through practice and experience. It’s been one of my greatest areas of struggle and growth, because for so long I’d been disconnected from my intuition, my body’s signals, my heart’s messages, and my healing capacity. So many of my challenges and symptoms shifted when I strengthened these connections and began trusting my innate healing capacity. We can practice by honing and honoring our intuition, keeping promises to ourselves, listening to and honoring our body’s impulses for food, water, movement, and rest, allowing ourselves space to feel and express our feelings, and nourishing our nervous systems, which expands our capacity to distinguish between intuition and fear, as well as real and perceived threats.

Self-Expression

Self-expression asks us to share and express our authentic selves out in the world. This means allowing ourselves to be seen in all our wholeness. It means sharing our unique gifts and embracing your inherent creativity. It means communicating our needs, wants, and desires, which also includes setting boundaries. It also means, when it’s safe and within our window of tolerance, allowing our bodies to express symptoms without suppression from drugs, perpetual busy-ness, numbing, or other distractions. This aspect of healing, in particular, deepens our connection with self and others as it demands a willingness to be vulnerable and uncomfortable. But it is one of the most powerful ways we can magnify our healing. For me, self-expression is a continuous journey of learning how to speak my truths and tolerate conflict, expressing difficult emotions, allowing uncomfortable symptoms to move through me, moving my body with intention, and exploring my creative side.

Wholeness

Revolutionary healing asks us to embrace and strengthen our innate healing capacity. It asks us to honor our wholeness by connecting with life, illness, wellness, and ourselves in ever-evolving ways. This means recognizing that we’re nuanced human beings. It means accepting all those varying, sometimes contradictory, parts of ourselves. It means working on integrating all these parts into one whole that works together for our highest good. It means giving attention to mind, heart, body, and spirit in any state of disease or wellness. And, ultimately, it means strengthening our Vital Force. Whether you’re confronting a career change, a chronic illness, or you want more peace and flow in your life, you can’t experience the profound shifts you seek if you don’t address all of your parts. You can’t heal your body without also healing your heart and mind. You can’t heal your mind without also healing your body and your nervous system. You’re a package deal.

Medicine

You are your own best expert, your best medicine, and your best healer. And, while we absolutely need a tribe of good people and practitioners to support us when we’re healing through illness, growing through relationships, or evolving through a career change, nobody can do this work for us. We must believe we can heal and that we deserve it, and we must do the work. I’ve experienced profound shifts in my life through multiple healing modalities, but their impact was limited without the foundational work I’ve described above.

Revolutionary healing will never be a one-size-fits all approach. We must open our minds to the possibility, the reality, that we are mysterious human beings who heal in multitudes of ways. We must learn to recognize our bodies, hearts, and minds for the miracles they are, sharing their wisdom with us in every moment. When we stop suppressing our wholeness and deepen our connections to self, others, and the world, we open new doors to healing.

A woman with blonde hair