There was a time when someone asked me, “If you know how to heal, then how come you still get sick?”
Little did that person know that I actually questioned the same thing when I had my heart attack. I have been supporting my body the best way I can so it is always in its homeostatic condition, and yet here goes a life-threatening event that I myself even questioned my knowledge and credibility over.
Overtime, the answer came to me. I have been advocating to teach people how to unlock their power of self-healing and help them understand that our body is designed to heal itself. For a long time, I have always asked my guides to help me do this effectively with integrity. So what is the best way to do it? Experience healing myself. When I fully understood the assignment, that changed my perspective. Me getting sick isn’t a failure of practice. I need to be able to be in that situation so I fully understand how healing takes place firsthand, not just textbook or curriculum-learned knowledge, but actual experience that goes with it.
I went through not just the physical struggle but also the mental and emotional roller coaster of going through a disease. It showed me how I can be present and be able to hold space for someone going through the same. So whenever I get sick these days, I thank God for giving me a new experience so I can learn more and know more.
When I came to see my mentor today and as she was teaching me new techniques, she mentioned that as healers, we go through experiencing different sicknesses so we know how to treat them. The more we become sick the better we become at understanding the disease. This statement validated everything I have been contemplating about.
A healer who masters their craft isn’t about the lack of disease, but the abundance of experiences getting through those diseases. My heart was one of the proofs that we have the power to heal ourselves if we open ourselves to different ways of supporting it and recognizing that we have control over our health. My experience allowed me to appreciate integrative medicine more than anything.
I think it is about time that we start recognizing all schools of medicine—allopathic, naturopathic, eclectic, and homeopathic medicine. I don’t think we need to pick sides. Each has something different to offer. For me, I have come to see them almost like different layers of support in the healing journey.
Allopathic medicine is great for intervention. When something acute or life-threatening happens, it can intervene, stabilize, and save lives. My own heart attack gave me a profound appreciation for this. Naturopathic medicine helps sustain health. It looks at how we nourish and support the body so that we can maintain health and address the foundations that influence how the body functions. Eclectic Medicine helps rebuild. Its understanding of the vital force recognizes that the body has an inherent capacity to restore balance and health, and that supporting this vital force is an important part of rebuilding the person after illness.
These are not necessarily competing ideas. They can give us different ways of looking at the same human being. This is what we have been missing when it comes to restoring and supporting our health. We have become accustomed to putting everything into separate boxes and then asking which box is correct. So I ask you, why do we have to choose? Why can’t we recognize that there are different ways of supporting the body at different stages and levels of the healing journey?
My heart attack made this very real for me. I needed intervention, modern medicine supported me in that moment when my body is about to fail and collapse. I needed my body to be supported through recovery, non-conventional healing helped me through this. I needed to rebuild, I worked with energy healing to support areas of my body that modern medicine couldn't cover. Through this experience, I came to appreciate the more subtle aspects of healing and the relationship between the physical, mental, emotional and energetic aspects of myself. It allowed me to see the value of having more than one lens. It also made me realize that the body is not simply a machine waiting for someone to fix it. Our body is constantly working toward balance and health, it just needs support so it has the proper environment and capacity to do it.
So when I work on my clients, I don't check what can be wrong with the person. Instead, I try to understand What the body is doing to heal itself, and how can we support it. That changed the way I see health. Getting sick is no longer something I see as a contradiction to what I teach. It has become part of my education. Every illness gives me another experience of what it means to be human, to be vulnerable, to receive care, to recover, and to support the body through the process. This is what makes a healer better at holding space for another person because we have experienced what it means to heal.
So whenever I get sick these days, I thank God for the experience. I know it is a signal that there is something more for me to learn. A healer who masters their craft isn’t about the lack of disease. It is the abundance of experiences in understanding how the body moves through disease and back toward health. Our own body becomes our greatest teacher.
