Podcast: Episode 39: What Is Healing?


I talk a lot about healing and how it’s possible, and I share stories of clients and their healing trajectories. This week, I’m sharing what I mean by healing and my beliefs on it in regards to human potential.

Healing can be anatomical, mental, or spiritual, and some people see it as an outright cure. Healing, for me, is beyond symptom recovery and management, it’s about listening to a call and taking a courageous step forward to change or grow.

Tune in this week as I share a personal experience of healing and why it is an opportunity that requires stepping into human potential. I’m discussing the distinction between recovery, management of symptoms, and healing, and sharing why healing promotes growth, wellness, and transformation.

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What You'll Learn from this Episode:

  • How to see injury or illness as an opportunity.
  • The importance of hearing your body’s whispers before the screams.
  • How to develop better insight into your injuries or illness.
  • Why healing looks like a shift.
  • How to see life as happening for you rather than to you.

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Male Announcer: You’re listening to From Pain to Possibility with Susi Hately. You will hear Susi’s best ideas on how to reduce or even eradicate your pain and learn how to listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream. And now here’s your host, Susi Hately.

With this episode I want to dig into the concept of healing. I talk a lot about healing and how healing is possible. I share stories about clientele who have both recovered and are moving into a healing trajectory. So that's led to some people asking me what it is I exactly mean by healing. And with this episode I want to dig into a little bit about my beliefs around that. And specifically about healing and human potential.

To start us off, I think a great place to begin is simply doing a Google search on healing. And to summarize that, it's that first of all, there's a ton out there when you Google healing. Some of it is in the anatomical realm, like tissue healing and cellular healing. It can also move into the mental health or the emotional health realm, as well as the spiritual side. Some people see healing as an outright cure.

For me, I see healing as very much related to human potential, about coming into a new place. There has been a change or a growth, there's been a freedom and ease. It's not only being okay with one’s circumstances or diagnosis, but it's really being okay in one’s soul for absolutely real. Yeah?

Now, I also see a distinction between recovery and healing. I see a distinction between management of symptoms, recovery, and healing. So the next step of this is really seeing the prerequisites. What's necessary for a healing trajectory to occur?

So I think the first one is that there needs to be some kind of understanding or belief on some level around life happening for people, as opposed to to people. That it enables growth, it enables a refinement of best qualities. So it's not happening to, we're not a victim to life’s circumstances, but really there's an opportunity to grow. That's the first piece of it.

I think there's another piece that injury or illness just doesn't need to be gotten rid of, that rather illness and injury is an opportunity. I do believe that recovery is a step towards healing. Where I define recovery as a reduction of symptoms, and of gaining a really solid understanding of what contributes to the expression of symptoms. And a better way of managing symptoms for more sustainable change.

And that sustainable change is really, really important because it's not just finding the Advil or the Tylenol, the recurrent types of interventions just to keep the symptoms at bay. But more so that we've uncovered the yellow lights and the whispers that contribute to the expression of the symptoms so that someone's got a really good understanding of where and how they can intervene earlier on. So much of that red light screening of symptoms doesn't exist anymore. There's less of a constriction of life. That there's a greater understanding of the symptoms in the context of living. That's all what I would say falls under the category of recovery.

Inside of the process recovery, oftentimes it happens purely on the physical plane, people see other professionals like chiropractors, or physical therapists, craniosacral therapists, osteopaths, massage therapists. Other times, they might involve energetic practitioners, like Reiki practitioners. Other times they'll bring in psychology or other counseling professionals. Or even religious mentors. More so what’s important is they have a clear toolkit on what has contributed to their recovery, and how they can maintain it.

They're operating at another level because they can see how their body barometer informs their body battery. They get a better understanding of the ebb and the flow of their symptoms, and of their energy, and of their overall response to life. That to me, is recovery.

At some point, for some people along that process of recovery, there's a movement along into a healing trajectory. Right? And we get into a little bit of woo woo when I talk about this. I've mentioned before about dialoguing with symptoms and understanding that there can be a message or communication inside the symptoms. This sort of takes it to the next level where there can be a call, a capital C call or a capital A ask. There's a pull toward taking a courageous step forward. A place where someone knows they need to go, they don't necessarily want to go there, but they know that they need to go there.

I think about the line by Anais Nin, which is, the day cane when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. So it's beyond symptom management. It's beyond recovery. It's really taking that courageous step forward and listening to the call.

Sometimes the call is asking for more integrity into out, maybe more authenticity, maybe just something else. Something is being asked. And oftentimes, the universe, if I could use it that way, has knocked a few times already, maybe prior to the injury or the illness or the trauma. But it either wasn't heard or the timing wasn't right. But now it is. The pull is stronger, it can't be ignored. Well it can be, I mean anything can be ignored. But there's just a greater push or pull of saying you can't ignore this.

Now, I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that something had to be horrible first, and that there's a big, massive change. No, not at all. In fact, oftentimes, this healing trajectory is more like fine wine in how it gets better and better. It's a little more nuanced than that, a little bit more subtle. On the outside anyway, on the inside it could feel like a caterpillar really going through a transformation at times. But the idea is that it's taking our best qualities and just making them better. It's being okay in one soul in a way that they weren't okay before.

Now, to highlight this I want to share a story of my husband Stu. And I'll get him on a podcast in a number of episodes so he can share his side of this. But his story of recovery, and how I see healing for him, related to his psoriasis, is a great example.

So when I first met Stu, he had psoriasis. It was almost all over his body, very, very red. Plaque-y, a lot of skin flaking. A lot of skin flaking where we were sweeping the floor more than twice a day. His skin was so red and raw that in the summer times people would come up to me and asked me if he was okay. And I think sometimes they were asking for their own concern, for themselves, because they weren't sure if it was contagious. Like it was pretty red and raw.

He, out of his own desire to support me, took part in a digestive reset that I was doing for a three-week period early on in our relationship. And I had removed some wheat, and some sugar, and some eggs, and some dairy. Just, you know, the classic types of sensitivities that people have. And he decided to join in because he thought it would be kind of curious.

Well, what blew both of our minds early on, was how in three weeks his skin completely and utterly cleared up, entirely. Like you would have not known at all that he had psoriasis in a matter of three weeks. Now, those of you who work with food and understand the power of food, of course, you're going to be like, “Well yeah, duh. It makes sense.” And I get that. And to actually see it happen, was unbelievable.

Now the trouble for Stu, at that time, was he liked a lot of those foods that he had taken away. So over the next number of years, he had a little bit of a stop and go figuring out, stop and go figuring out, seeing what was contributing to his skin. Getting an understanding into his own brain about his own beliefs about his own recovery. And, well, you know, it is a genetic thing, it's never going to go away. So this is just what I have to deal with. And I actually really like this food. And there's a lot of back and forth in his brain and all around the place.

And then something started to shift. He started to just change the way he was eating. He started to change what he was consuming in terms of alcohol, water, coffee, tea. He started to tune in more closely as to what he was putting into his body, but why he was putting it into his body.

He was tuning into the stress loads, and how that was propelling him to eat certain things. He was also tuning into the stress loads and the way that it was responding through one of the weaker links in his body, which was his skin. He was starting to understand the tools. He was starting to understand the responses. He was starting to hear the whispers.

So he was solidly in a recovery process there, of getting a clear understanding of what was contributing to why the skin was what his skin was. Then something happened for him. And he started to get a greater clarity of where he needed to move. Now that part of the story I'll let him share, but he just got a greater understanding of where he needed to go.

Now it took them a few goes to get there because it required some courage, it required some clarity. And then as he kept going his skin became clearer, and clearer, and clearer and the flare ups became less, and less, and less. To the point where I was looking at a skin the other day, which is why he became an example for this episode is his skin is so clear you would never know he's had psoriasis. It's really remarkable.

And who Stu is, and how he resonates, is different. Now he's still Stu, the people who are around him would still say he’s Stu. And the people who know him would say there is something different about Stu. There's something in the way that he is, there is something that’s in his expression, there's something and just the way that he goes about his life. That's just that subtle difference, that nuance difference. That's what I'm talking about here is that there's this shift in this transformation. There's this stepping into a human potential.

Where the recovery process was the first step of it, a realization of an ask or a call, the courage to follow that call, and where that took Stu. And then into just the living that out. So that the next time something challenging were to come, there was a knowledge of how this is, again, something happening for and not to, and the process can then elevate and grow him again.

And I find this happening over and over and over again with my clientele. It’s that their understanding A, that listening quality of their symptoms. The understanding of how those symptoms relate to their body battery, their body barometer. Feeling the whispers, understanding the screams, being able to intervene at that whisper level, so they don't have to hear the screams. Gain a really clear sense of the ebb and flow of their battery. And having those tools, they can then take them into each scenario, each life shift, each life curve ball. And they continue to grow, and elevate, and improve themselves in a way that really expresses their human potential.

That's the opportunity here around healing being possible. Coming into a space that you can feel being pulled but might take some courage to step into. And then utilizing all of that which you learn from the recovery process and taking you into that healing trajectory.

Now, if this interests you, this has kind of finagled some type of spark inside of you that you want to explore further, there's two ways you can do it. The first is I have my three-month one-to-one series. Where we start with your physical body. Working with the qualitative and quantitative aspects of how you move, how you breathe, your ability to become still. And helping you become aware of those things that you're not aware of so you can take steps forward, reduce your symptoms, reduce pain, and then seeing where that takes you.

The second is, is you can work with me at the therapeutic professional training level. Where we teach you how to work with people to support them in reducing their symptoms, reducing their pain, managing flares, helping recover from surgery, with this idea of healing as being possible. As healing as being related to human potential, helping people step into that which is most important to them. That which is being called to them, that which has been asked of them. And it really makes the process of recovery, particularly when you integrate it with medicine, super remarkable, and impactful, and significant.

So if this calls to you, you can see the link below in terms of how you can connect with us, see that in the show notes. You can email us at [email protected] or visit us at our website at functionalsynergy.com. I would love it and I'd be honored to work with you.

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