Episode 23: Cultivating Strength Is Non-Negotiable

I understand that you have gone through a great humbling experience with your healing journey and how it has brought you to your knees many times. I also know how that translates into a feeling of weakness and apprehension. But when you allow this weakened state of body, mind and spirit to keep percolating for years on end, it quickly morphs into more of a need to isolate and less resolve or motivation for what needs to happen in order for you to move forward on your healing path. Weakness will never be a strength and cultivating strength during alchemical healing is non-negotiable. What I mean by that is that when you agree to overhaul your entire life and re-evaluate and tear down what is not working any longer, you can’t do that if you are weak in body, mind and spirit. Each of those must be strong, fortified and interconnected so that your body can rely on your mind and your connection to spirit is strong enough to get you through the times when you’re not sure your body and mind will follow. Consciously focusing on strength also involves expecting more out of yourself and more out of the healers you work with. If you don’t do that, you risk languishing for years and possibly decades in this airy-fairy cloud of weakness and non-action. There’s a time for rest and there is a time for rebuilding and regeneration of the body, mind and spirit. It can take two years once you set forth with this intention, and even longer to see tangible progress if you’ve really been through the mill and had time to rest and sleep and do whatever you needed to withdraw from life and heal. But if you stay in that quiet reflective place too long, you stagnate, along with your body and mind. In today’s show, I go into detail on why it’s important to strengthen your spiritual body, along with your mental and physical body. I provide plenty of insight, along with targeted supplements and therapies that I personally have used and helped me cultivate the strength I needed to get where I am right now. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is for people who are ready to heal body, mind and spirit and are willing to take full responsibility for what that involves. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. This podcast contains adult language and themes that are not suitable for young childre

Join me on "X": https://twitter.com/LaurelDewey
Join me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thealchemyofnaturalhealing/
Email: laurel@thealchemyofnaturalhealing.com

HERBS, SUPPLEMENTS AND MORE THAT I STRONGLY ENDORSE!

VIBRANT BLUE ESSENTIAL OILS:
Parasympathetic – https://dv216.isrefer.come/go/para/LaurelDewey/
Limbic Reset Blend - https://dv216.isrefer.com/go/limbic/LaurelDewey/
Fascia – https://dv216.isrefer.com/go/fascia/LaurelDewey/
USE: CODE: LAUREL10 for $10.00 off your order.

HYPERION HERBS: https://www.hyperionherbs.com/discount/LAUREL10
USE CODE: LAUREL10 for 10% off your order

ANCESTRAL SUPPLEMENTS: https://glnk.io/2oy4j/laurel
USE CODE: LAUREL10 FOR 10% OFF ORDER

KANNA EXTRACT COMPANY:
Use this link for 10% off: https://kannaextract.com/?aff=20 OR COUPON CODE: LAUREL10 for 10% off your purchase

...

Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 23. Today’s topic is: “Cultivating Strength Is Non-Negotiable.”

            As anyone who is a regular listener of my podcast knows, I grew up within the alternative healing, mind/body and personal transformation movement and I’ve observed, often to my shock, how over the last forty years, these modalities and concepts have been hijacked and distorted by many of those who seek to control their followers or clients. Instead of helping people find their inner strength by teaching them how to metaphorically grow their wings to fly, instead I noticed an agreement where a person’s weakness was not only allowed but encouraged in the name of ‘giving them space’ or ‘giving them more time to process’. Once I became involved more deeply and personally in the transformation movement when I became chronically ill and sought out advice and healing, I was truly blown away by how many of the healers I visited were more interested in keeping me in a place where I would gain some benefit but never achieve any quantum change that led to emerging from the cocoon I was inhabiting at that time. I was there to heal and I was willing to do and experience and operate outside of my comfort zone anytime I needed to take that leap. But there was this sense that I had to always be careful and they’d use the term, “with an abundance of caution” that I didn’t move into strengthening and regeneration of my body too quickly. Mind you, at that time, I’d been in major retreat mode, resting and working a lot less and not engaged in life outside my healing for nearly two solid years and I felt it was time to begin the rebuilding process which I knew could easily take two, three or more years.  But when I’d bring this up, I’d hear things like “let’s not push the river.” I don’t whether it’s because they were inept, or because they didn’t want to lose the revenue stream or because they didn’t understand that eventually the entire point of healing is to re-emerge into your world and occupy that world with new eyes, new awareness and most of all, greater strength on all levels, body, mind and spirit. In all of the classes, workshops and healing groups I attended during my intense healing journey, I can honestly tell you that I was never given the fundamental tools that would lead to me strengthening my body, mind and spirit. Now, obviously, I haven’t met every healer that exists in the world and I really hope that there are good men and women out there who promote and teach people how to strengthen their body, mind and spirit. What I encountered was what I interpreted as a conscious or unconscious need by the healers and teachers to keep people in a weakened emotional and mental state and never challenge or confront their avoidance, evasive tactics, or their clear lack of initiative and motivation. Their illness or whatever issue they were dealing with was allowed to be their constant excuse as to why they could not attain the strength that was required to truly heal. I remember hanging out with other participants at these workshops and seminars and realizing how many of them had been revolving in the same stew of procrastination and avoidance that had left them shockingly weak physically, mentally and emotionally and incapable of seeing how weak they were. And when I would suggest to any of them “hey, you should try this modality or this exercise” or whatever because it had helped me strengthen this or that, I was met with a lot of resistance, victim mentality and obvious disinterest. I found out that many of them had been revolving in the same circles for as long as twelve years without getting better and even falling backward in their progress. I wanted to ask them, What do you have against being strong? What scares you about strength? Expectations of you? Are you comfortable in that in-between state of exploiting your continual need to rest and stagnating in that place of inaction? And if that sounds judgey to you, I did that exact thing for a period of time in the beginning. I’d been in the rat race for so many decades that I hung in that delicious hovering place until I realized that if I stayed in that comfortable place, I might never emerge from it. So I absolutely intentional sought ways to get stronger in all ways. And that’s why I was truly disgusted at times with the lack of accountability from others and the enabling of inertia from supposed healers that I saw around me during my healing process. 

            There seems to be a need by many of those who have leadership roles in this movement to keep people in a needy space, to enable their dangerous lack of decision making and to not want them to ever inhabit strength of body, mind and spirit. I’m not sure the reason for this unless the leadership are doing it on purpose to keep people continually chained to ‘the process’. If they get too strong, they may leave the leader’s group or stop attending his or her seminars. So I thought, you know, I’ve got to do a show on this because someone has to bring this up and say not only do you need to get stronger, if you don’t get stronger, you are never going to actualize whatever potential or destiny you came into this world to experience. I understand that you have gone through a great humbling experience, and it’s taken you to your knees and I absolutely know how that translates into a feeling of weakness and apprehension. But when you allow this weakened state of body, mind and spirit to keep percolating for years on end, it quickly morphs into more of a need to isolate and less resolve or motivation for what needs to happen in order for you to move forward on your healing path.  Allowing that weakness to take you down corrupts your life, the people you live with and anyone who has to deal with you and who is genuinely trying to help you. Nobody enjoys being around a victim. They are energy vampires. And anyone who has had to endure that type of personality knows what I’m talking about. The pity pot people. 

Weakness will never be a strength and cultivating strength during alchemical healing is non-negotiable. What I mean by that is that when you agree to overhaul your entire life and re-evaluate and tear down what is not working any longer, you can’t do that if you are weak in body, mind and spirit. Each of those must be strong, fortified and interconnected so that your body can rely on your mind and your connection to spirit is strong enough to get you through the times when you’re not sure your body and mind will follow. Consciously focusing on strength also involves expecting more out of yourself and more out of the healers you work with. If you don’t do that, you risk languishing for years and possibly decades in this airy-fairy cloud of weakness and non-action. There’s a time for rest and there is a time for rebuilding and regeneration of the body, mind and spirit. It can take two years once you set forth with this intention, and even longer to see tangible progress if you’ve really been through the mill and had time to rest and sleep and do whatever you needed to withdraw from life and heal. But if you stay in that quiet reflective place too long, you stagnate and your body stagnates and your mind stagnates. When you don’t have any stress to speak of, you lose your mental sharpness. You lose your problem-solving capabilities. And do it long enough and making a sandwichis going to feel like stressful event. Sometimes a little stress that demands something from you is a good thing. Too much languidness is not conducive to moving you into the ‘you’ that you are exploring. 

Cultivating true strength on all levels is non-negotiable because just like people believe they can bypass anger, rage, pain and grief and still be able to awaken into their greatest potential, many in this movement also try to do a lot of workarounds when it comes to developing strength. They spend a lot of time drowning in their ‘process’ and not demanding more from themselves. There’s a wallowing I’ve witnessed where once they fall into the therapies and colorful world of personal transformational healing, many people just want to be told what to do and how to do it and feel oddly overly victimized or offended – and I mean offended - at the notion that they need to get more resilient, more contained, more discerning and more confident while simultaneously not allowing those attributes to override the gains of humility, true compassion, a greater connection to life and the present moment and so much more. 

Why is strength of body, mind and spirit so vital to your recovery? Well, you will need to build the muscle of strength because the more awakening and fortified in body, mind and spirit you get, the more you will have to use that strength to overcome any number of obstacles. And once you generate and learn how to direct and use that strength daily, the things you used to see as ‘obstacles,’ are no longer obstacles nor are they approached with the same nervous or apprehensive energy. They go from big immovable rocks to pebbles. Thus, the obstacles don’t carry the same energetic weight they did before you gained strength. You’ve also learned to regulate and strengthen your nervous system, so you don’t fall into reactive programming. You’ve learned to face your fears and not allow them to run your programming or prevent you from hanging outside your comfort zone. And if you haven’t done that, you need to get on that train.

Now, when I talk about strength, it may not be the same definition you have of the word. Often, strength is seen as muscular, aggressive, bulldozing, loud, overwhelming and dominating. That’s nowhere near the strength I’m suggesting you cultivate. Strength should not be confused with toughness. Toughness is resilient energy that has a thick armor around it. Strength is built from the inside out. Toughness is created as a reaction to trauma or what you see as a threat that you have protect yourself from. But it’s a false armor. This relates to both men and women. Women who have been betrayed, abandoned, not protected, certainly abused and more often adopt a tough girl attitude that naïve people might see as “being strong,” but it’s just a façade she uses to keep the world at arm’s length. I’ve know women who were widows in their thirties and the photos of them taken after their husband’s death compared to the photographs with their husband even a month prior to his death are often painfully reflective of what may pass for strength but what is really the reverberations of shock still echoing inside them, encased in a thick skin of unhealed trauma.

The kind of strength I am talking about is not overly, brawny men with huge muscles. I can’t begin to tell you how many jacked up muscular men I’ve worked with who came to me back in the day to learn about nutritional programs who I really got to know over a period of years and who were completely using their obscenely jacked up bodies as a way to keep the world away. Their backstories are always somewhat tragic or abusive on some level. You read stories of men who are body builders and you’ll see a pattern emerge and that pattern has to do with either a guy who was bullied or viciously abused as a child or someone who had no father in the house and who felt if they didn’t overdo their masculine nature they would be consumed by their experience and environment. Some of the most broken men I’ve ever worked with are those who project to the world a hard, muscular, kick ass façade and who are not healing because they can’t drop the façade because if they did, can you imagine the way other men would treat them? They have no choice but to appear tough and even terrifying. And they know they have to maintain that façade. And it’s killing a lot of them inside. You can’t hold onto to all that trapped emotional pain for decades without having a serious illness show up. And that’s why they’d come to me back then. But if they stuck around long enough and they learned they could trust me, they’d talk to me about their fears and that took massive courage from them. Because being weak to them was being open and honest about how much pain they were in. So the point is that just because you see some guy who is pure muscle and projects this often terrifying veneer, it doesn’t mean that they are strong inside and capable of experiencing true healing because they are doing everything they can to hide behind this muscular armor because they see exposing themselves as a massive threat to their entire life. And that’s why guys of that ilk don’t get help until they are drowning in health issues. These are the guys you often see doing psychedelic sacred medicine ceremonies and when they have a major breakthrough, well katie bar the door, you’re about to watch the mountain crumble before you. And there’s a lot of pain inside that mountain that has to come out and be experienced and cleansed and regenerated. So a lot of guys who do the ceremonies and get in touch with the root of their pain, often return home and pull back on their obsessive bodybuilding. They still work out and take care of themselves, but they turn down the volume on their need to project this balls to the wall physique. I find that a beautiful thing to watch. As their inner strength is cultivated through facing their greatest fears and acknowledging and feeling their deepest pain, they begin to shed the tough guy armor and I’ve seen how their eyes soften and they look less reactive and much more relaxed.

So what I just described are caricatures of what you might think strength looks like. But these are distorted perceptions of what you’ve been told by society or some exceptionally damaged, angry woman who’s got a lot of personal demons and wants to make sure you follow her so you can feed her hungry demons. The strength I’m talking about and the strength you will all need to move through your healing journey is built and inhabited differently. 

While it’s important to strengthen the body, the mind, the emotions and the spirit simultaneously, sometimes you can’t strengthen your physical body right away because of illness or injury. That’s what happened to me. And my mind and my emotions were incredibly weak for a long period of time. So for me, and for many others, focusing on one’s spiritual connection to God or Source or whatever you want to call that energy that is out there and within you, is absolutely critical. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you cannot do this type of intense work if you do not strengthen your connection to a higher power. I am not a religious person in the least but man, do I have a strong connection to God as well as the angelic kingdom that for me, was the catalyzing energy that carried me forward once I surrendered to it. If you’ve been burned by religion, and I get that for sure, you’re going to have to figure out how to build a bridge and get over it and approach your spiritual connection in other ways. Being in nature perhaps. In meditation. In heart-centered mindfulness techniques. Maybe in some type of volunteer work where you help people less fortunate and see God actualized in their faces. People who hate religion because religion screwed them over have got to get over this reactive hatred of the word “God.” Just because it’s been weaponized and leveraged by whatever church you went to, doesn’t mean you should be afraid of the word “God.”

Okay, so once you gain a foothold with your spiritual connection, start actively and intentionally strengthening your emotional and mental bodies. And that occupies a huge stadium of possibilities. But before I mention those, I want to make sure to include what I think is very important regarding not getting derailed on your progress while you are in therapy. If a therapist or anyone you chose to work with suggests that in order for you to heal, you must become vulnerable, politely decline that invitation. If they insist that you become vulnerable, walk away. Anyone who demands vulnerability as your pathway forward to healing is either intentionally or unintentionally asking you to reactivate your deepest wound. This insight was shared with me early on by a shamanic healer I worked with. She explained that the word vulnerable is rooted in the Latin word vulnus and vulnus literally means a “wound”. So when you are told to be vulnerable during a healing session, you are actually being asked to be re-wounded. This made absolute sense to me as I never could get on board with a therapist in the past (prior to working with this shamanic woman) who demanded vulnerability from me in sessions. Intuitively, just something about it felt as if I was being asked to fall into a pit of rattlesnakes just to keep experiencing it and then be told to crawl out of that pit and talk about what it feels like to fall into a pit of rattlesnakes. And then rinse and repeat each session. That’s just putting your nervous system through an unnecessary workout! Who benefits from this type of therapy? There is no point in retraumatizing yourself by re-wounding yourself and expecting that this is going to lead to some breakthrough that will generate inner strength. Are you kidding me? I’ve witnessed others who engage in this type of ‘be vulnerable’ therapy and all I ever see with them is an ungrounded, spiraling undoing where their emotional wounds are gaping open and they can’t function and they can’t communicate because everything is raw within them.  

If you keep opening the wound, how is it ever going to heal? That is not how you cultivate inner strength. You cultivate strength in a therapeutic situation by being receptive to the information, certainly allowing the suppressed pain and grief to move through you, and - this is vitally important during therapy - taking plenty of time between sessions to off-gas what comes up and have time to reflect on whatever came up through a calmer nervous system. I cannot stress that enough. Nobody is going to heal and generate the strength one needs when they are in a constant state of nervous system attack by being put in a vulnerable or wounded position or state of mind. The classical definition of the word “vulnerable,” is “susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm.” Just picture it for a second, when you’re wounded, it prompts a protective mode, survival mode, even escape mode. The wounding immediately preoccupies your senses and it’s counterintuitive to be ‘open’ when you are under attack. So you are not required to take another hit in order to heal all the other hits you’ve endured. 

So getting back to ways to strengthen the mental and emotional bodies, I tend to agree with the stoic principles which I will actually do an entire show on later this year. When I was first given a booklet on the stoic principles, I thought it was a cold-hearted approach to inner strength. But at that time, I was pretty undone emotionally and I think I saw many of the stoic principles for strengthening the mind as discounting my deep emotional pain. But once I was able to get distance from that and heal a lot of it, I re-read the booklet and was totally on board with the principles. And since I am going to do an entire show on this, I won’t go over all of them here, but there are a few I’ll highlight simply because they are lighthouses to gaining the strength you will need to overcome whatever challenges you have to deal with. 

The first stoic principle I read is about control and that to strengthen your mind, you must agree that you have very little control over life in general and really the only thing you can control are your thoughts, your actions, your attitude and your words. Everything else is an unknown entity that you’ll have to deal with as it arrives. You must accept that principle. 

And that leads to another stoic principle which is in order to eliminate your fear of the unknown or worst case scenarios that contribute to a weakening of your psyche which obviously doesn’t lead to strengthening you, the stoics suggested examining on paper or in your head all the potential setbacks that could occur in any given situation so that you are prepared for those setbacks and maybe even have a Plan B or Plan C in the event of that occurring. This is not the same as focusing on the negative (which does not strengthen you) but rather, to focus on actively coming up with solutions should this occur or that occur. And even if you don’t need Plan B or C because the worst scenarios never occurs, you are training your mind to devise ways to see past the worst case scenarios and move out of that freeze response that really weakens the mind when it’s dealing with adversity. 

And on the subject of adversity, the stoics were big on how to overcome adversity and how by doing that, you strengthened that muscle within you that put you in a frame of mind of finding solutions and persevering even when everything looks grim. Instead of seeing obstacles as barriers to progress, see them as opportunities. When you start to reframe what you perceive or say is an obstacle, you want  to flip it around and look at it as a way to solve a problem from another point of view or figure out to use the experience to become more resilient. This one truly changed a lot for me on the mental front and when I embraced it, and got my emotions out of it and my fears and everything else, this method really did work. 

I can tell you from adopting this attitude toward adversity, I was able to move through a lot of incredibly stressful situations that I know would have derailed my life a few years prior. Adversity can strengthen you if you allow it. Through the many tests you are given, you are finding out what you’re made of and how much all that healing you say you did actually took root. Are you walking your walk? That’s what happened to me. Just four years into my healing, I thought I was on the upswing and that my transformational process was nearing completion. During that time, I had a woman contact me asking if I would talk about my transformative journey and even write a book about it. While I was open to doing it, my intuition told me ‘absolutely no!”. I told her I was still too close to what I thought at the time was my release from the worst of it. Thank God I listened to that intuition and followed it, because little did I know, I was less than a year away from the next level of pure hell that lasted for three solid years. That is when I had to prove to myself and my creator what I was made of. I had gone through what I thought at the time was tremendous deconstruction and rebuilding and there was no way in hell I was going back to that hellscape. But what I found out was that the lessons I was about to experience had nothing to do with me descending back into hell but all about the requirement of me maintaining optimism, devising creative solutions, maintaining my physical health, using my downtime not to obsess on what was going on around me but to release myself from the chaos temporarily and take in the views. Instead of descending into a dark pit again, I was able to take the horrible adversity and deal with it and it did make me a lot stronger than I was at that four year mark. Gratitude kept me sane during that hideous time. I realized while the walls were closing in around me, I still had plenty to be thankful for and I focused on that every night before I went to bed.  The adversity I was dealing with also forced me to learn and practice patience, something I was never good at doing. I was always the one saying, “God give me patience and I want it now!” But during that time, I had no choice. I also had to confront many fears I had that I had not completely worked through and I did that and that also was incredibly strengthening to my mind and emotions. 

Going through adversity, especially adversity that requires physical, mental, emotional and spiritual strength and trust will show you how strong you are. What you are capable of. “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” Bob Marley said that. And I agree. And I can’t begin to tell you how powerful the feeling of satisfaction is when you are finally able to reach the end of that particular adversity and come out the other side with more clarity, greater awareness and the insight and knowledge of how to operate in your life moving forward. For me, adversity also strengthens your resolve and teaches you what traps to avoid in the future. What mistakes you don’t want to repeat. What you will not entertain in your life anymore. We all have unpredictable situations that come at us fast and we have to adapt and we have to sally forth. But if you have the opportunity to take your past adversities and understand the patterns enough so that you don’t willingly put yourself back into the situation that has a high potential of exhausting you, putting you in a precarious position and so on, you take that opportunity. There’s a saying, “Never go back to what broke you.” I worked with a few people years ago that gave me the impression that if I was strong enough in body, mind and spirit, I could go back to what broke me and find some sort of redemption in it. Some ability to see my power and how far I’d come. I attempted with pure intention to accomplish that many times and I can tell you that not only is not a good idea to go back to what broke you, the people who suggested it to me, I learned later, had no capability or intention of doing the same thing they suggested I do. The idea was that it broke you and you’re stronger and more enlightened now and able to understand the dynamics and recognize where the individuals are attempting to manipulate you or outright sabotage you and so you can somehow, because you are healed or on the healing path, face that better and not be used by them. That’s a lovely theory but it doesn’t work when you are surrounded by narcissist abusers, people who choose victim mentality, mentally unstable people who generate chaos out of thin air, or people who expect you to act and react in the way you were when you were unhealed and extremely asleep to their abuse. That’s a big one. You will be talked to, regarded and seen as your unhealed self. And when you react to these people who were the foundational source of your former brokenness, from your healed nature, they are going to accuse you everything from being superior, or uppity, or say something like, “Who in the fuck are you?” The spiritual teacher Ram Dass has a quote I love, “Think you’re enlightened? Spend a week with your family.” For myself and many others, part of strengthening the mind involves being aware of a land mine situation and not walking into it just to prove you can get blown up again. I began to really ask questions like “What’s the point of this? Who am I trying to impress? What am I trying to prove? That I can take a hit and keep getting back up? Oh, no no. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t willingly walk into mentally and emotionally abusive events or situations just so we can display the shrapnel of the intentional wounds as badges of honor or for sick attention. Certainly, learning how to build and maintain boundaries is vitally important when it comes to cultivating strength and not allowing yourself to be drained or weakened by people who would love to crawl over those boundaries and infiltrate your life. 

So many other attributes of strength that are involved when you are healing. Self-Control is strength. Resilience is big strength. Critical thinking is strength. Listening more than speaking is strength. Not being reactive is real strength. Learning how to regulate your nervous system is massive strength. Not speculating is strength. Not assuming is strength. Think about how when you react, speculate and assume how that weakens your point of view and your perspective as well as often makes you look weak. Never make a decision based on speculation or assumptions. 

Let’s switch over to strengthening the body. Strength is fortified in your root, sacral and solar plexus chakras (which are the first, second and third chakras) and then with the fourth chakra, the heart, activated, the passion and heartfelt desire to do what needs to be done engages. Without adding the heart to this, you just have raw energy and motivation which is great. But it can become too much and so you need the heart energy to regulate and soften the sharp edges of all that motivation and internal power. Example: You want to train for a race. Engage root, sacral and solar plexus and you are grounded in your desire, focused and full of needed willpower to power through training and consistency. But then it’s just raw drive and that can be hard to be around. Blend in the heart energy which infers passion that is heartfelt vs. passion that is sacral or solar plexus and you have a potent mix that still allows for allowing that heart energy to be seen and felt.

I did five specific things in the beginning when I intentionally set off to strengthen my physical body. These are not in any particular order of importance. They are all equally important in my opinion. Again, this is what I did and if you’re interested, I encourage you to study these and do your research and decide if they are right for you. Because as I always state in my intro for the show, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a therapist.

First up, are organ supplements. I did a lot of research to find high quality organ supplements that were clean and powerful. And I finally found a company named Ancestral Supplements that I absolutely endorse 150% because not just the integrity of the company but how incredibly powerful their organ supplements are. I started off with their Liver supplement and then quickly added on their Adrenal which was felt like shot of deep meaningful energy I hadn’t felt in years since I literally flatlined adrenally for over three years. Then I added in their Thyroid and their Collagen supplement. I still take these to this day and don’t plan on ever stopping. I do have a link in the show notes to Ancestral Supplements and a coupon code for ten percent off your order. 

Next up is tonic herbs that feed and heal the kidneys and adrenals and medicinal mushrooms. Again, I tried many different companies and ended up working with Hyperion Herbs and there’s a link to that company as well in the show notes with a coupon code. Burnout always goes to the kidneys thanks to their close location to the adrenal glands. The mushrooms I used daily were Chaga, Gynostemma, Cordyceps and Reishi and I used Reishi primarily to heal and nourish my central nervous system. Understand that it can take up to one hundred days to really feel Reishi mushroom’s incredible power. But you’ll absolutely feel changes within the first ten days or so of daily consistent use. The tonic herb I used from Hyperion Herbs for energy and further strengthening my kidneys was Polyrachis Ant. Yes, ground up ants and not the ants in your garden. These are large ants that are bred for this exact purpose. It’s VERY potent and you will Polyrachis Ant immediately in the way that it grounds and strengthens your body. 

Next up strengthening vagal nerve tone. The vagal nerve, known as the tenth cranial nerve, is a huge subject that I can’t go into in detail right now, but it’s imperative if you’ve had long term stress, decades of trauma, if you are engaged in the sympathetic nervous system response of fight, flight and freeze, you need to address and strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system response. And that’s done through vagal nerve tone. The vagal nerve is known as the ‘wandering nerve’ and it winds and moves from your head to your tailbone. Lots of ways to activate and strengthen your vagal nerve tone. Here’s a few things I did. First, sit quietly in a meditative state and hummmmm or do the OMMMMM sound. That sound resonates in your vagal nerve pathway and carries that sound all around your body. Sitting in the sunshine to do this or in a sunny window in the winter is a great addition to this exercise as I always felt the sun activated another healing element. Another way to strengthen vagal nerve tone is to get a big bowl and put ice in it and then cold water and hold your nose and place your face into that bowl of ice water for up to thirty seconds if you do it that long. When I started doing it, I think it made it ten seconds before I came up for air. Then I’d wait and repeat another two or three times and I eventually was able to work up to thirty seconds. Strangely enough, this exercise creates a deep calming after you do it.

There are two essential oil blends I strongly recommend for maintaining vagal nerve tone and engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system. They are both from a company called Vibrant Blue Oils and I have direct links on my show notes with a coupon code if you’re interested. One is the Parasympathetic Blend, which I’ve mentioned before and the second is a newer product they have which there is Limbic Reset Blend. They offer them in a roll on which is fantastic, and the Parasympathetic Blend is applied to the ridge around the back of your ear and then massaged around that area and I also like to include the earlobe and apply this on both sides as the vagal nerve runs directly along that pathway on both sides of your head. Now your Limbic System works in tandem with the Parasympathetic System and is known as your “emotional nervous system” and is responsible for your threat detection and response to that threat. So if you have been on guard, on edge, hypervigilant, and so on, both your Parasympathetic and Limbic system are exhausted. If you would describe yourself as hyper-sensitive or reactive to stress or you are currently working in therapy to address these issues, I highly recommend these two blends because they are really beautiful together. The Limbic reset blend works by applying one to two drops on your forehead (above the eyes and on the temples), at the base of your skull, at the back of the neck, on the bottom of the feet and especially on the amygdala reflex point located on the big toe. For quick use, you also unscrew the cap and inhale the blend for three to four breaths. 

Other strengthening herbs and foods I did were Red Ginseng, also known as Korean or Panax Ginseng. I did it both in tincture and using a syrup to make a tea. This is incredible for stress, strengthening the immune system and maintaining a consistent energy that builds over time. I’m also a big believer in incorporating healthy, good fats into your diet, primarily grass fed butter and beef tallow. I grew up with beef tallow and regard it as one of the best fats for cultivating greater health and mental well-being. I also suggest warm and hot foods versus cold or iced beverages because warm and hot are strengthening to the digestion and that’s a critical element to rebuilding your body, via good digestive function.

Last two are obtaining or finding a gym that has mini-trampoline or what’s called a “Rebounder” as this works to strengthen the body while pumping the lymphatic system to move all that stagnant energy. In addition, I encourage to either purchase a small or full body red light therapy system which goes right to activating your cellular energy via your mitochondrial function. 

You know, when you really put your intention into strengthening your body, mind and spirit, the results of that intention begin to show up in your daily life. You begin to feel more grounded and through that, you are able to be more observant of your life and the life around you. You are able to see where you are not compromising or where you being taken advantage of in the name of charity, necessity, disrespect, or whatever manipulation is used to weaken your position. You know what you have to do in order to cultivate this strength and you also know what it takes to maintain it and continue to do so as you get older and you are willing to adjust the programs to address how your needs change or evolve. One of the other advantages of gaining greater strength is understanding one’s weaknesses and knowing which ones need to be addressed first before addressing the next and so on. But this also involves understanding that you are not invincible as you used to believe you were when you were younger. To believe you are invincible is a dangerous ego trap and understanding limits is important. When I say limits, I don’t mean underperforming or not reaching goals. I mean take it slow and steady with working out and never do it to exhaustion. But always strive to do a little bit more each time so you don’t allow what you think are your limitations to be your ceiling. Because I’d been completely inactive for almost three straight years, I had to be judicious when I began rebuilding my body. I needed to build a lot of muscle I’d lost over the course of those years. So walking every day, using the rebounder and always stretching was how I started. When I started, I could barely walk one hundred feet before I had to sit down. And I felt unsteady on the Rebounder at first, but I worked up to it. I added 30 seconds every few days and before I knew it, I was up to ten minutes which I never thought could happen. 

            In closing, I want to reiterate the type of strength I am promoting on today’s show. The strength I’m talking about is not loud or showy. It’s calm but aware. It’s being the observer and being discerning. It makes decisions fully recognizing and weighing the varied consequences of each decision. It recognizes the fragility of life and chooses to reinvest itself into Life so opportunities are not wasted. It’s builds the confidence needed to take those opportunities and make something of them. Something that nourishes your life and the lives of others who are able to live their lives better because of something you created, produced or shared. As I read recently in an article, “Life doesn’t easier. You just get stronger.” 

Before I wrap today’s show, I want to let all of you know I’m putting together an episode soon where I answer your questions about alchemical healing and anything I’ve covered on this podcast so far. I’ve already gotten some great emails that I plan to include on the show and want to encourage all of you to write me with your questions. My email is on the show notes. But I’ll repeat it here: it’s laurel@thealchemyofnaturalhealing.com . And if the Q&A show gets a good response, I want to do follow up shows in the future because I absolutely love getting inspired by what you all have to say. As always, thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like what you hear, share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. Looking forward to you joining me next week when we’ll talk about “Getting Advice”. New episodes drop every Saturday. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”