Ep #225: The Many Paths to Self-Healing

 

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• Katelyn Sonnier
• Monique Derouen
• Lynda Richard

 

Full Episode Transcript:

Ep #225: The Many Paths to Self-Healing

Welcome to More Than Mindset, the only podcast that bridges the gap between spirituality and success. Go beyond the mind with clarity and confidence coach, Kim Guillory, and learn how to integrate your passion to serve with your skills and experience to create a business you love. Let’s get started.

Hello, and welcome back to the More Than Mindset show. I have a few guests. Today we are talking about Wellness Week and the paths to self-healing because there are many paths to self-healing as we discovered personally. So, today I am talking to Katelyn, Monique, and Lynda, and we are discussing their path to self-healing.

And so, I’m going to start with letting you all know that we have Wellness Week coming up in June. Someone want to help me with the date? Is it 19 to 23? 19 to 23? And it’ll be a weeklong, five days, and we’re going to be talking on a different topic every day. We’re going to bring in Ayurveda and an integrated path to self-healing through food, nutrition mindset.

We’re going to be talking about mind body healing and the ending chronic pain, really understanding where chronic pain comes from, illness and disease, and how to control it. And we are also going to be talking about relationships and different dynamics of relationships.

So not just friendship or marriage or parenting, but all relationships and how these different paths are the core to healing. And you can actually just take one path. And get complete recovery. I’m looking at Katelyn, who’s up here on my left, so I’m just going to go ahead and start there. Katelyn, do you want to share your experience of self-healing and the path that you took?

Katelyn: So, when I got my diagnosis of fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, I was at a loss and I was brought up and raised in the western medicine where you go to the doctor, you get prescribed prescription medication, and everything is better. So I went that route, and I felt better.

But I knew there was still some things off balance. So, the path that I chose of Ayurveda really helped me bring mind, body and soul and alignment. And it really helped me understand my symptoms, understand the symptoms of fibromyalgia, understand the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, and look at them in a way of it’s just, some elements in my body that are disorganized, that need to be put in a different organization way, a different organized way.

And that’s all I needed to do with food, herbs, lifestyle practices, and a little shift in changing of my beliefs. And I’ve been doing that for almost 16 years now on myself, and now I’m helping other people do it. And it’s definitely been a path of healing and self-discovery.

Kim: What was the first thing or the primary thing that grabbed your attention that got you to seek more? I remember what it was for me. I’m curious what it was for you because you were you in your health coach training or your yoga teacher training? Like at what point did you find Ayurveda?

Katelyn: In my yoga teacher training, and I think the word that comes up for me the most was disconnected. Like I felt like I was constantly looking outside of myself to try to understand what was going on inside of myself. So, I was going to different churches. I was going to see different naturopathic doctors.

Because I went down that path of looking for somebody to tell me what’s going on, to tell me what’s wrong, different styles of yoga. And I remember when one of my teachers who was an Ayurveda practitioner started talking about Ayurveda. I was like, “oh wow, that really makes sense.” Like it was a visceral response for me of, and how she worded it was like, all of your wisdom, all of your knowing that you need to heal yourself is in your body.

And now, oh, I’m getting the chills now. And I was just like, “Yes, now help me hear that. Help me hear that.” And so, the path of Ayurveda brought awareness to what the wisdom of my body was trying to tell me.

Kim: Was there a point where you realized “oh my God, this is too hard, I can’t do this?” What happened along your path?

Katelyn: Sometimes I feel like that still happens. And it is a practice of just coming back home. Like I practiced it for a while, and I was really dedicated and disciplined for about a year, and then life happens.

Like I met a man, and I started pursuing that and my attention shifted to something different. But my body screamed, and it didn’t have to scream as loud as it had in the past. And so, I would come back on, and I would nurture it and I would take care of it, and then I would get pulled in another direction if that was school actually, I got pulled in that direction and then I would forget about it and then my body would start to tell me like, “hey, come back home.”

So, it is an ebb and a flow, an ebb, and a flow, but it’s tools that you can go back to. You’re like, “oh wait, I forgot that I used to do that.” And that felt really good, and that grounded me and brought me home and I really loved that recipe or that herb really helped me out.

Kim: And why do you think that Ayurveda could be a path to healing or to self-healing? Like just Ayurveda by itself?

Katelyn: Because it addresses the mind and the body, and the soul and it brings it all into alignment. And like I said, because it puts you in touch with your inner intelligence, with your inner wisdom and your inner knowing.

So, if you look at a child who has not been conditioned by the world, yet three and four. They look at themselves in the mirror and they really love everything about themselves. And then the world shows them all the things that they shouldn’t love, and then that’s when it stops.

Ayurveda brings you back to the knowing that you are a divine light and a divine essence of something greater and something bigger. You’re just expressing it. And so, for me it, it’s hate healing with beliefs because you are constantly shifting your belief to believe that you are of divine essence.

And whenever you can honor the divine within and see the divine within yourself, then you are less likely to choose the things that don’t align with that divinity and that essence. But it’s a practice and it’s a discipline.

Kim: And it addresses so many areas. This makes it interesting.

All right. Thank you. I’m going to move on to Monique. We’re going to talk about mind, body and I’ll just ask you the same question is what was it that first drew you in? First tell us a little bit about what mind body is?

What mind-body connection or mind-body integration led to your path to self-discovery or self-healing?

Monique: For me it was understanding that the mind and the body are extremely interconnected and that if one is out of sync, the other will be out of sync. And so, when you can pull the head and the heart together and create that cohesion, then the body does what it’s designed to do naturally. It’s this magnificent healing machine.

It knows how to heal a cut or a wound or mend a broken bone on its own. And so, if it can do that, it can do much more. But I was never exposed to that.

Like Katelyn, in my younger years, I was on a mission, and we’d get sick, and we would go to, Western medicine and again, would feel better. But there was more. I knew there was more. And when I began to uncover this and figure it out, my life began to change in so many ways.

Kim: And did you come across some resistance, like for yourself? Did you pop in and out of it sometime? Believe it sometimes didn’t the chronic pain came back. And did you have that same experience? Because we see so many who get started, and like Katelyn said, life happens and then another issue comes up. And what would you say Monique?

Monique: Yeah, I would say very similar. I was researching and studying and following people and I was getting misinformed on a lot of things. I was having book knowledge, but I wasn’t having that visceral response, that embodied response to know what did or didn’t actually work. Tons of information, tons of knowledge, and not applying it properly.

Kim: Could you give an example of that for the listeners?

Monique: I took multiple courses and read books and would investigate, and I knew what they were saying was correct. I knew that all pain was deciphered in the brain. I knew that the body was feeling what the brain was saying.

All of that was very logical to me, but I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t physically change it. If I did, it would be very short-lived. It would be for five minutes or 10 minutes, and then the pain would come up and the fear would come up and the disappointment would come up and the hopelessness would happen, and I would stay in this fear-pain-thinking-feeling cycle.

I call it a vicious cycle cause that’s what it felt like inside of my body. And then I would just get disappointed and shut down and go into that slump.

Kim: I’m curious about like when the resistance comes up to you guys, and I’ll give you all an opportunity to answer this after. Think that could be from it’s just so different from the environment that we’re currently in. Like we get this new knowledge and it’s so impactful and powerful and it’s almost like a state of long leanness and you want to share, and then when it’s not received it, it starts planting doubt.

What would you say, Monique?

Monique: Absolutely. When I first started talking about this, people thought I was crazy. I would say, you can heal your body with your brain. And they were like, you’re right. And so, there was that fear of being accepted. It wasn’t socially acceptable. It wasn’t community acceptable. It wasn’t environmentally acceptable. People didn’t really know what I was saying. I didn’t really know what I was saying in the beginning.

I was just repeating what my body was responding to like my body almost instinctually knew that this was right, but my brain was trying to put together the puzzle pieces of what I had never heard of before. And so just imagine something you’ve never heard, never experienced, never seen, but you’re like, there’s something there, but you can’t quite put it all together.

Yeah, very lonely. Unacceptable. And so, the fear I believe kept me as well as many other people from actually following through all the way to that true embodiment.

Kim: And why would you say that someone could go. All the way with just the mind-body understanding your integration, like I’m asking Katelyn because we recognize that all of these paths could be a path to self-enlightenment, to holistic healing actually an overall optimal way of living life.

Monique: Using mind, body work specifically is a path because when your brain is functioning without the distractions, without the conditioning, you can do things that you could never do before. You have endurance, stamina potential. When we’re not afraid to move the body in a certain way, the body can move in a certain way. When we’re not afraid to do the things in life we do them.

But Katelyn said, when we’ve been conditioned and taught from a very young age, don’t do that. That’s wrong. That can hurt you. That’s not good. Whatever it is, as a protective measure from our adults and authorities we create a fear inside of ourself and that fear keeps us stuck.

Kim: So far, I think we’re agreeing on the same thing about the misinformation, and I think it’s innocently done.

I don’t think it’s malicious in any way. If we can only pass down what we know, right? And so, we can only receive what was passed down to us by what someone else knew.

So, Lynda has kind of both sides. She’s going to move into relationship, but she also understands the mind body connection as a massage therapist.

And I should have introduced us all with our trainings and we can go back through that whenever we’re done. Linda, so you have the understanding about this is what led you into the whole relationship part. You’re on mute by the way. So, do you want to share how you connected the dots between mind, body, and relationship and where you are today?

Lynda: I was coming into bodywork; I was experiencing a phase of my life where I was struggling in a relationship. And so that was like my driving factor into seeking out the help was because my life was like a revolving door of chaos and my brain told me, if you could just pick the right one, if you know you made better choices in men, if you could just make them change that the rest of your life would look so much better because once your relationship is right, everything else would be right.

And with the bodywork, the mind-body connection there and how it applies is that I didn’t realize just like Katelyn was saying, the body screams when it’s out of alignment and mind body was telling me all kind of things based off of the relationships that I was in, but I didn’t recognize it instead of recognizing it and changing.

Having the frustration and recognizing it and working through the frustration or making a change to eliminate or reduce the frustration I coped with drinking or drugs or whatever it was. So, the relationship aspect, I was convinced that if they changed, if I found better people, that led me into searching.

How to make the relationships better and in finding out, okay, I’m going to dive head first because I’ve finally met this man that I want to make it work with. I finally realized like I can’t make them change, and I can’t pick better people until I look inward at myself and start focusing in on what it is that’s creating my desire to pick these kinds of people.

Or my desire to make them change, to make me feel more comfortable, or they need to change so that I don’t have to speak up and say what I want and need in a relationship. All of those things, the chaos of unaligned relationships, it impacted my body. Like I would eat too much. I would drink alcohol to feel better or to not care, and I wouldn’t, I would be in such a stress mode that I wasn’t showing up for work like I should have been.

I wasn’t giving a hundred percent to my kids like I should have been because my mind and emotions were consumed with the chaos. That was my relationships. So, without the health of the relationship the rest of my life. And that’s why I was saying like part of that was true without the health of my relationship.

All aspects of my life were just outta whack because I couldn’t give them the attention that they needed. And until I addressed me, I wasn’t able to create the relationships that I wanted.

Kim: And do we hear this like the number one relationship is the one with yourself? I actually think it’s a disservice to tell the world that when they actually think it’s the mother, the father, the husband the wife, the kids. Can you speak to that?

Lynda: It’s so true because like I was saying, like I thought it was the guy, I thought if I could pick a better man, if they could just change, I believe.

That it was their fault. They were the reason that our relationship was failing each and every time. I didn’t know that I played a part. I thought I was innocent in it, but, and when I say healing the relationship with the self, it’s more of coming into a space of awareness of when they’re doing the wrong thing, recognizing the feeling that it creates in you and where else in my life did, I feel this before?

Because it didn’t start in this relationship. It started somewhere before. And that’s where like the pattern of, it’s like when you drive home on autopilot and it’s like you left work and then, “oh wow, I’m pulling in the driveway. I didn’t even remember the drive.” Like we get an autopilot on our relationships too.

So, when the things upset us, it’s like we just have this instinctive response to behave or say or do certain things. That’s just how we have conditioned ourselves to survive relationships. And one of the things is placing the blame on other people. It feels safe that way because we don’t have to do. The experiencing the emotion any more than that one moment.

If we can immediately take the emotion of frustration or anger and take it away from ourselves and let’s toss it on them because it’s their fault, that feels so much more comfortable than, “Oh, what part did I play? Where did this come from? What could I have done differently in this situation? Where am I not speaking up for myself?”

That’s scary. And so, it is easier to say it’s their fault. They made me mad, they did the thing, and it’s just, I feel it’s normal, the societal norm of like bashing the husband. Bashing the nagging. Like the nagging wife because it’s so normal to hear and it just has become such a norm to place the blame on our spouse, on our parent, on our friend.

They never called me. Have you called them? My mom wasn’t there for me when I was a kid. How much was she parented? How well did she learn how to be a mom? How much support did she have around her? What did her relationships look like? We don’t take any of this into account when we’re pointing the finger and placing the blame again, because we’re more concerned about our comfort.

And like I said, it’s easier to put that emotion on someone else through the blame rather than taking a look at ourself.

Kim: It’s like a radical personal responsibility, just everything is on me. If everything is on me, how did I play a part in this? And it opens up so much. Could you share a story of when you came to this realization?

So, I’ve been working with all of you for quite a few years and this that I see here today is not what we’ve started with. I’m curious if you could share a story or an example of like when you were getting coaching on your relationship or you were putting blame.

Lynda: So, the big thing for me, like my struggle and it seems like such a petty struggle and relationship, but that’s where my focus was on. So, I didn’t have to think about everything else. Was my husband not supporting me in the house with helping clean and helping pick up and helping the kids?

I felt so unsupported, and I just wanted him to do the things I wanted him to pick up after himself. I wanted him to do the dishes and every time it was like if he would just change. And the thing that you said to me that, like it took a few times of you saying it, but the thing that you said to me is, can you just do the thing?

Can you take accountability and do the thing that makes you feel good? Doing the dishes. If you want to go to bed with a clean sink at night, why don’t you do it because it makes you feel good, not try to make him do it and do it from a place of love and servitude. You’re serving yourself when you do it.

You’re serving your family when you do it. And that like completely shifted my perspective on, “oh my gosh, if I meet my own need, I get to love my husband and go to bed happy with him.” And it was just like, it blew my mind that I could sit there and happily do the dishes. Or pick up laundry all over the house.

When before it was like, I would be like, I’m going to sit here and see how many days they don’t do it, and I would just create more anger and frustration for myself. It was like this crazy cycle I was putting myself through but taking responsibility for meeting my own need. A clean house makes me feel comfortable and at peace and happy and gives my mind the freedom to focus on the kids and my husband and whatever else I want to do. But I wasn’t taking responsibility for meeting that need. I was putting that responsibility on him.

And so that would probably be like the biggest thing for me is that situation where he would leave his boots one day. I picked his dirty boots up and put them on his pillow on the bed so he’s going to see them. He’s going to get this right one day.

Kim: How was that working compared to doing your own?

Lynda: He never learned; he still doesn’t do it from punishment. He’s so much better. But it took me dropping the expectation of him meeting my needs with that I could meet myself because when I was so focused on the things that he wasn’t meeting for me. I didn’t notice anything that he was like, he was financially providing, he was handling the yard work, he was handling like the rebellious teenage son. He was like being my shield in my guard for all these people during this time of my life that we were going through a lot, and I was getting attacked from the outside a lot.

He was being that shield in the block for me and I couldn’t see any of it cause I was fo focused on the dishes and the boots and the little things that, that I could have taken care of myself.

Kim: And I think we can say that for all areas. When you’re focused on the pain, when you’re focused on the symptoms, instead of focusing on the medicine, which is the food and the mind and the soul, and coming back to south, coming back to present.

So, I just want to ask one question. So, you’re going to have to answer quickly so that this can actually go into the podcast, and that is how did you let go of the expectation to make them change that responsibility for, I know this, everyone needs to know this. So, like how did you change that?

What was the defining moment where you no longer felt so responsible for everyone else having to change in order for you to receive? I’ll start with Katelyn and then go to Monique. Linda touched on it in case we do run out of time. Katelyn, there was a moment where this super responsibility.

Katelyn: Yeah, it was a moment when where I found myself no longer taking care of myself and tending to my knees because I was like I said, like putting people in headlocks and trying to pour Ayurveda down their throat.

And I came to the realization of just like you were on your own journey, and you got there on your own time, like 16 years in, and you’re still learning, like they’re going to get there on their own journey, and this may not be the journey for them.

They may need to hop on another path that they understand and align with. More so it was really just taking my hands off the wheel and letting them drive their own vessel. How did that feel? Oh, so much better. So much better.

Kim: Yeah. Thank you, Monique?

Monique: Yeah, so I realize how long it took me to actually embody the knowledge.

To truly understand what I was reading and learning and hearing, and then put it into practice. Put it into play. And it’s not a one session deal. It’s not a six month. You’re healed and life goes on. I think we’re always healing. I think we’re in a journey and we’re walking through different things and as I learned and I embodied and I changed, a little bit changed, then a little more changed, then a little more changed.

And so, I had to have grace and compassion and understanding for that version of me that took this long to get here so that I could also reflect that back to other people in my life. And their journey is their journey, but when they’re ready, it’s here. And I’m here to help guide and I just feel honored to be a part of that.

Kim: How did it feel when you came to that realization?

Monique: A weight came off my shoulders, like a hundred pounds just melted off. The pressure that I felt to hurry up and help the people, so they didn’t suffer anymore was very real to me.

And now I’m just like, this is here. It’s available. I’ve got your back. If you want to be a part of it, come join us when you’re ready.

Kim: Thank you. All righty guys. Wellness Week is coming very soon. We’ll put the link below and there will be a replay for a certain number of days, and if you want to come and do this work with us, we are available in Self-Help Masters.

We’re all mentors in that group. It is a self-help membership where you can be the newer version of yourself, and no one will be judging you or thinking you should be different. It’s actually a place to come and practice because we are always new iterations of ourself constantly as we’re moving through life and changing and learning new things.

So, if you have friends, family, acquaintances that would be interested in self-healing or a holistic healing journey that would be interested in joining, share this episode with them. Share the podcast, share the More Than Mindset Facebook group, and make sure you give us a rating and review so that the podcast can reach more people.

Thanks for listening to this episode of More Than Mindset.