Nearly five years ago, I began a slow crawl towards a life of self-betterment. I spent the first half of the last decade bandaging my wounds under the guise of “having fun”, but I felt empty at my core, unsure of why my mental health continued to waver. It took a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis to recognize that something needed to change, and that ultimately, it was up to me to take greater responsibility of my health. I wanted to heal, and I wanted that healing to happen organically – so I began to do research.
The idea behind functional medicine is that true healing comes from addressing the root cause of illness rather than just the symptoms, and autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s are powered by inflammation. Changes came slowly for me – I removed inflammatory foods, little by little, to gauge my body’s response to them. As I felt my physical symptoms begin to diminish purely by the food choices I was making every day, I felt compelled to take my healing journey even further. My energy levels had increased tenfold, and I wanted to MOVE. Over the course of five years, I leaned into my body’s request and began exploring different forms of exercise. I tried running, BBG, pilates, yoga, and bouldering, eventually opting for a mix of the latter three because I noticed that my body responded better to lower impact movement. This was it – I was listening to my body. And as I traversed along the path of wellness, exploring health rituals and mantras and my relationship to my body and my mind, I felt more alive.
But something was missing still. I felt “healthy” but unhappy, and it wasn’t until I began working with @nikki.norenberg in her Tapped In program that I recognized how deeply I had buried myself under the mask of “health & wellness”. I was, again, bandaging my wounds, but this time under the guise of “being healthy”. I was working hard to repair the outward perception of health that I had neglected the inward connection to self – the root cause to so much of my emotional pain over my lifetime was that I never learned to love myself. (...continued in comments)
