This featured article is sponsored by VSL#3. All opinions are my own.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my health journey. And so, today I wanted to take some time to talk about where I’ve been, how I’ve been feeling and what’s next. I started this website back in the winter of 2009, just over a decade ago, and it’s incredible to see where I started with my health and where I am now as I begin to more fully emerge back into life and start to truly L-I-V-E. I’ve learned a lot throughout this journey of chronic illness from the age of 24-38, and it’s taught me more than I can put into words. However, I am going to do my best today to talk about a few of the experiences that really made a profound difference with my healing process—especially my experience with the high-potency probiotic medical food VSL#3 for the management of IBS. 

THE FIRST SHIFT INTO INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE 

The first shift I want to address is releasing the old paradigm of allopathic medicine and working with Integrative Medicine + Energy Medicine. This has been profound for me. If you’ve read my book, Eating Clean, you know all about the difference between the conventional medicine route and the alternative path (the road less traveled). If you’re new here or you’re just starting on your journey, I highly suggest reading the front of my book as well as the integrative medical testing in the back of the book so that you can understand how and why to find an integrative practitioner who can look closer at your condition and imbalances as well as the tests that gave me so many answers – that unfortunately allopathic medicine does not use.

This shift into Integrative Medicine is the first step. Here is where you’ll start to realize that many of your diagnoses are simply jumbled up toxicity: yeast, mold, fungus, non-beneficial bacteria, heavy metals and so forth. Shifting to Integrative Medicine changed my life because it allowed me to address all of these issues on a deeper level and it took me off of medication. It looked at my body as though everything was connected – something no one addressed with me for even a second before I discovered this new way to fully treat the body.

From Integrative Medicine, I still had healing to do that couldn’t be done by solely relying on medical treatments and supplements, so I went on to discover Energy Medicine and dove into years upon years of how to heal the nervous system and trauma, all of which is what shut me down in the first place, unbeknownst to me until my mid-30s. It’s taken me quite a while to understand this deep connection, which I couldn’t clearly see for many years because I was in such a state of survival, fear and pumping out cortisol and adrenaline every minute. I will be speaking much more deeply about how I connected all these pieces moving forward this year on Instagram, so stay tuned for more about this mind-body connection.

For now, you can read these mind-body articles to start to help you piece together what has slowly been shutting you down over the years because we all know illness does not happen overnight – it’s a long journey of toxicity accumulating, bacteria getting out of balance, stress compounding and so much more. It’s the result of years, often decades of imbalance in our bodies that conventional methods overlook. Now, it’s up to us to take our power back, to take full responsibility for our own wellbeing and help to address what has been out of balance within ourselves. 

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM + STRESS

In regard to stress, which is something I often ignored reading about throughout the first portion of my journey, I do want to mention how important it is to regulate your response to stress versus just trying to lower your stress, which often backfires. In my experience, so much of this comes down to regulating how we respond to stressors in our daily lives that toss us into survival mode and keep us locked in that mode for months, years, and even decades because getting out of the go-go-go to slow down is too scary for our nervous systems and this often becomes who we think we are – we think this is just “us” but it’s not. It’s actually learned behavior that has kept us in survival mode going 100mph unable to address what’s going on deep down inside.

What happens when we’re in survival mode is that our digestion slows down so we’re left with bloating and digestive issues while our food does not get digested properly and ferments in our gut, turning into everything from SIBO to candida and more serious issues. This is where probiotics come in, which I’m going to touch on in a moment because they’re a key piece to our health journeys and it’s important to know what brands to trust and use regularly.

Along with our digestion slowing down, our livers also stop detoxing toxins, which is what leads to all sorts of health issues because the toxins that we accumulate in our bodies everyday have nowhere to go and no way to leave the body, so they get recirculated throughout the body and wreak havoc on our organs, especially our digestion. PMS is one example of this because if our livers are not detoxing our hormones, those hormones get recirculated throughout the body and start to cause terrible symptoms from PMS to endometriosis to more serious hormonal conditions. The liver is also in control of so many internal operations and affects our moods, our breath, and our digestion and is often the culprit of brain fog and fatigue.

HORMONE BALANCING

Lastly, when we are in survival mode, our reproductive organs start to stall because our bodies do not think it’s safe enough to carry a child. When even one tiny hormone stalls and falls out of balance, the other hormones follow because hormonal balance is a dance and when one is high, the others are low or when some are low, there are others that are high and so forth. This also pertains to our digestion because we have so many hormones in our gut, which I learned after I gained tons of water weight after having C. diff colitis ten years ago. When your hormones are off, you’ll experience everything from weight gain to hair loss, brittle nails, mood swings, sweats and so much more. With hormonal imbalances, you’re also likely to experience candida since our hormones play a role in the levels of yeast we have in our bodies, which is another reason your digestion may be off and you can experience bloating and gas as well as other digestive symptoms. 

Just from this brief overview, I hope you can start to see how our minds impact our bodies, especially our digestion, and how we have to look at our bodies as a whole to start feeling better instead of covering every symptom up with a band-aid approach, which ends up not working in the long run and often causing more harm than good. Our gut makes up over 60% of our immune cells so it’s the headquarters for your immune system and the hub for so many of our day-to-day ailments, not to mention it contains trillions of bacteria, which you’ve heard me address over and over again throughout the years. Most of this bacteria is beneficial bacteria keeping us healthy (because we are more bacteria than we are cells, folks), yet there is also non-beneficial bacteria and if you’re someone with IBS or other digestive issues, you know what I mean. 

SOOTHING RITUALS

What you’ll notice from all of the above is a common thread: digestion, which is what takes such a huge hit when we are stressed or living in survival mode, which we all are living in these days! Because of this, I want to talk for a minute about a probiotic that helps me tremendously in my gut health journey and has continued to benefit me in incredible ways. It has been a staple in my refrigerator, and it is my go-to recommendation for my clients as well as my family for quite a long time.

Along with taking VSL#3 probiotic daily as a supplement with my vitamins and minerals, I also add it in recipes as another way to get my daily dose of high-potency probiotic into my routine. Most people ask me how I’ve been able to stay so positive throughout all of these ups and downs and it’s because I literally made everything I had to do for my health into a ritual.

I bought beautiful tiny handmade wooden bowls to hold my daily supplements, so I wasn’t reminded every day that I was sick with tons of bottles of nutrients around me; I added this VSL#3 probiotic to my smoothies and chilled summer soups to allow me to be a bit more creative in my kitchen versus taking it as a capsule all the time; I bought beautiful plates on sale at Marshall’s and made myself beautiful meals (when I had the energy to do so); I bought a few electric candles and dimmed the lighting in my home with dimmers so my adrenal fatigue didn’t suffer from bright lights; I bought a small speaker for my kitchen and listen to beautiful music (like this playlist I created for you) to soothe me and relax my nervous system while cooking; and so much more. These are a few ways I started creating soothing and nourishing rituals for myself. I have many more that I will share as time goes on and now that I’m really starting to get my energy back, you’ll see more of me, especially on Instagram stories. 

Speaking of Instagram stories, I’ve created a delicious organic soup recipe (as seen in the photos in this article) using VSL#3 probiotics and you can watch me make it step-by-step.

VSL#3 PROBIOTICS

So, now that you have a slight peek into how I’ve been able to manage my health journey, I want to give you some more information on VSL#3. Whether you’re living with digestive issues, or you experience gut health imbalances from time to time, I’ve found that it’s key to really keep your microbial balance in check with a quality probiotic and it’s taken me many years to find one that my body does not reject and that actually works for me. 

If you’re like me and you’ve dealt with IBS or other digestive issues, you know that it just so happens that we end up with more non-beneficial bacteria than beneficial bacteria in our gut, which can lead to anxiety, bloating and overwhelm in trying to manage and determine what is actually going on inside of us. I use VSL#3 for the main reason that it provides multiple strains of bacteria needed to restore the necessary amount of good bacteria in our gut. I nearly fell on the floor in amazement when I realized this probiotic carried billions of CFUs (colony forming units) because up until that point, I personally had never seen a probiotic that powerful.

Now, patience is key here. Just because there is a lot of power in this probiotic, it can take up to one month for the colonization of the gut to become optimally stable, so be patient with yourself. Patience is key because stressing out over not feeling better “soon enough” does more harm than good, putting you even deeper into survival mode and making the situation much worse. 

What I love about this probiotic is that it provides a higher CFU count and diversity of strains than other leading over-the-counter brands* to help protect the GI tract and help manage your gut health – I like to think of it as helping to restore the necessary amount of beneficial bacteria in your digestive tract. Please note that, VSL#3 must be used under medical supervision.

I prefer to use the powder form of this supplement as shown in this article but you can certainly use the capsule form if you’d like. Remember these probiotics must be refrigerated to keep the bacteria alive. And for those of you who need to read ingredient lists, this probiotic is free of lactose and gluten and non-GMO verified. More information on VSL#3 and its use for serious digestive issues can be found at www.vsl3.com.

TRUSTING YOUR BODY + MOVING FORWARD

As you continue to work towards building back your health, I implore you to also keep in mind the connection between what’s going on in your mind and your body. This was a huge piece of the puzzle for me. When you’re anxious, what is going on in your body? Does your stomach hurt? Do you feel pressure in your head? Do your shoulders get tense? Start to look at what your nervous system is telling you – your body is a feedback mechanism so in conjunction with taking supplements and probiotics, it is key to look at your own level of consciousness (self-awareness) and see what feedback your body is giving you based on what is going on in your mind. I suggest digging deeper to understand what causes fear in your nervous system as that will directly impact your digestion and your overall wellbeing. Start with this two-part series on How to Trust Your Body Again, which is a powerful place to begin. 

I’m sending you all a lot of love and remember that life is a journey and chronic health issues are a wakeup call to help us restore and reclaim who we are, take full responsibility for our past and move forward into a more conscious way of living so our bodies can return to balance. My book, Eating Clean, is a wonderful resource to help you get started and to point out the deeper medical testing that took me years to discover. My hope is that this article provided you with some support and guidance on your own journey. 

Believe in yourself and keep going. If I can do this, so can you. 

*Compared to Culturelle and Align.

VSL#3® is a probiotic medical food intended for the dietary management of ulcerative colitis (UC), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or an ileal pouch. Use under medical supervision.

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Ahhhh the nervous system. I’ve been trying to get my mind and body out of survival mode (anxiety, fear, terror, overwhelm, etc.) for over a decade now and it’s taken me many years to be able to regulate my nervous system so I can finally feel safe. This has been no easy task but it has been SO worth it and has made such a huge difference in my health mentally and physically. 

Trauma, Energy + The Nervous System

If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t realize you’re holding onto trauma. Surprisingly, we’re all holding on to some shape or form of trauma and it’s shocking to hear this because we think trauma is going to war or witnessing a shooting or seeing a scary movie but it’s actually everyday junk that we experience on a daily basis as well as suppressed emotional pain from our childhoods that we can’t consciously recall.

I’ve talked a lot about trauma in the past, especially in this featured article, How Trauma Impacts Your Health, and it’s been a topic I’ve been incredibly passionate about bringing awareness to throughout the last six years of my twelve-year healing journey. If you’re new to the concept of trauma and your health, I suggest diving into my featured article, The Trigger that Pops Your Balloon, to acclimate yourself with these concepts before moving on and understanding how when our emotions aren’t dealt with they become trapped energy in our body because, well, emotions are ENERGY IN MOTION.

Because our conscious mind isn’t handling these emotions (ex: because say we feel anger or rage at something that happened in our day and we’re at work and we can’t scream, so we push these emotions down and ignore them), these emotions get repressed into our subconscious mind and become our lens for how we see life and we’re walking around with this energy inside of us, which we’re often not aware of. This is what starts to trigger our mind and our body out of whack because when energy cannot flow properly in our body, it leads to physical, emotional and energetic blocks that appear as physical ailments such as headaches, self-sabotaging behaviors, unconscious reactions and so forth. This is why energy work and energy medicine are so powerful and why I’ve talked about them extensively over the years here on this website and throughout Instagram because solely treating the physical body with a supplement or a bowl of spinach isn’t going to heal and restore the body when it’s out of whack on the emotional and energetic layer, as well.

Survival Mode

Because the majority of the world is in survival mode right now because of the coronavirus situation, I wanted to share an easy way you can help yourself on a daily basis to pull yourself out of survival mode (fight-or-flight) and calm down your body and any maladaptive stress responses (anxiety, overwhelm, etc.). I’ve learned many different protocols and somatic exercises to support and regulate the nervous system, which will all be addressed in my upcoming retreats, but I’m sharing a short audio snippet below of how you can help yourself in your day-to-day life when you feel your stress response come on and you can’t seem to pull yourself out of it.

Now, along with helping you regulate your nervous system, I highly suggest checking out and reading a few personal resources from my journey that I know will support you throughout these next few weeks and beyond while the majority of the planet is in survival mode. If you haven’t read about survival mode yet, I suggest my featured article, How to Get Out of Survival Mode and Heal Your Body as well as How to Trust Your Body Again part I and part II.

And lastly, there are many personality traits that pull us into survival mode without us realizing it, so I suggest looking into the following featured articles to help you understand what your own stress response might be stemming from: The Highly Sensitive Empath and The People Pleaser and Worthiness and Not Feeling “Enough”.

If you are someone currently experiencing physical symptoms during this coronavirus time, I recommend reading my featured article, How to Feel Safe When Experiencing Symptoms, to help guide you through this process of fear when your body doesn’t feel safe.

And lastly, before we move on, I must share one of my favorite pieces of the healing journey, which is softening the armor we wrap around ourselves to “toughen up to life” because of traumatic experiences in our past (breakups, fights with a spouse or partner, job layoff, a painful argument, and so forth). 

The softening process is key for allowing your nervous system to relax and reset. Trust me, it takes time to consciously be aware of when your body armors up to protect itself and you can do this. Self-awareness is something you’ll learn as you move on with this journey and will be a huge asset in trusting yourself and your own internal wisdom (intuition). I hope you enjoy this featured article, How to Soften: A Key Step to Healing.

The Movement is also incredibly helpful for this un-armoring to get us back into our bodies and heal ourselves. If you’ve been on one of my retreats, you know how powerful this is!

LISTEN

Please stay safe during this time of the coronavirus, and I am sending you all a huge hug from NYC. Stay well and please feel free to ask any questions below. 

Much Love,

Amie xx

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One of my dear friends (and one of the most brilliant doctors that I am blessed to have in my life), Stephanie Morango, MD said something to me last year when I was struggling with the toxic fluid/excess weight on my body. She said, “It’s all about self-acceptance. Give people back their toxic energy; you don’t need their shit in you anymore. There is nothing for you to do, Amie. It’s how you learn how to use what you’ve got. Be okay with your weight and it will come off. When you’re in a new place, you’ll choose new things that will contribute to taking the weight off. Get to a place where you’re okay with your body where you feel safe to actually be in your body. How are you going to accept and release the weight? Acceptance is a state of being that you must cultivate. It’s a feeling. Be in the feeling, Amie.”

Hmmm, I thought.

She’s got a point.

And that’s what I’m sharing with you today.

Self-acceptance.

It’s not something any of us were brought up learning how to do.

Well, maybe you were taught that if your parents were conscious enough to have self acceptance for themselves. But, most of us were not. And then we end up as adults and we don’t even know how to cultivate acceptance with our own bodies.

Sad, isn’t it?

It’s like we go through life on a roller coaster and we never stop for a minute to think, “Hey, do I have self-acceptance?”

As Stephanie said to me, “It’s a state of being that you must cultivate. It’s a feeling. Be in the feeling.” I was lost. I had no idea what the heck she was saying to me. I’ve been to dozens of healers and mediums and body workers and shamans and astrologers and yogis they’ve all told me so many things. All true and all helpful, which is mind-blowing in and of itself. But, what they told me used to go in one ear and out the other until I started writing down what they told me in my phone so that I could look at it again and again to finally try to understand what they were trying to get me to realize.

Somewhere along my journey of life, I got tripped up on thinking self-acceptance was the same thing as self esteem. I had lots of self esteem growing up but I was lacking self-acceptance. Something that many of us are lacking without even knowing it.

To my surprise, I soon discovered that self-acceptance is not the same as self esteem. How could I be so confident in life and speak in front of thousands of people and be on national TV without having any trouble at all, yet I didn’t accept myself. I was always trying to change something about myself to make me better, better, better. It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom in my 30’s with my hormones and my health again- after 10 years of chronic illness, that I started to go deeper into myself to discover what was really going on in this mind of mine.

And here’s what I found.

According to Psychology Today, “When we’re self-accepting, we’re able to embrace all facets of ourselves–not just the positive, more ‘esteem-able’ parts. As such, self-acceptance is unconditional, free of any qualification. We can recognize our weaknesses, limitations, and foibles, but this awareness in no way interferes with our ability to fully accept ourselves”.

And so that’s what I had to do. I had to learn how to accept the parts of me that I wasn’t able to accept. I had to learn how to like myself more, instead of beating myself up for every single thing. I had to stop judging myself and learn how to cultivate more love within my body for myself. I had to look at all my scars and bumps and excess weight and see them as perfect and not broken.

In the article above, it talks about how we’re only able to accept ourselves as much as our parents accepted us because before the age of 8 when we’re a sponge absorbing everything we see and hear and feel, we’re in our subconscious mind and we take all of that with us into adulthood.

Something I’ve been working on the last few years is cultivating unconditional love. I had no idea what unconditional love was. No one ever talked to me about this. It was something that I discovered reading hundreds of mind/body books and realizing that when you accept yourself for who you are, you have unconditional love for yourself. Same goes for other people in your life. When you can love them for who they truly are- on a soul level- and it doesn’t matter what they look like or what they do to piss you off, you still love them unconditionally, that’s the name of the game. The wild thing is that so many of us focus on conditional love. I admit that I did and still sometimes I do this and I have to catch myself. I believe we do this because as kids, many of us are only loved conditionally when we do something ‘good’ that our parents approve of and so then we spend the rest of our life doing things to get approval from others as well as looking for conditions to make us feel lovable and this causes us to give only conditional love because then we’re only loving others based on things they do. This whole thing is so screwed up. But, the point isn’t to tell yourself that you’re screwed up. Everyone had a wonky childhood and everyone has gone through rough patches in their life. The goal is to learn how to love ourselves for the shape and size we are and for our personality and for the soul that we are. That’s what this is all about. It’s not about liking someone because they dress well or only liking someone if they can help you out in someway to get ahead. Those are conditions and when you need conditions to love someone or yourself, then everything gets thrown out of balance.

Love yourself for who you are, for what you are, for the fact that you are breathing right now, for your body that is working hard to keep you alive, for the home you’re living in, for the air that you can breathe and for the sun shining every single day. That’s how I’m learning how to love myself more and more beyond self esteem and cultivating more self-acceptance for my body and my story and my past and everything else. I’m learning how to love me for who I am and anyone that doesn’t love me for who I am can go find someone else to play with. The friends and family in my life are loving and love me unconditionally. I realized this when I blew up with 70 pounds of fluid from the progesterone cream toxicity. I couldn’t believe they still loved me and wanted to talk to me and hang out with me despite what I looked like. I was shocked. What does that have to say about me?

I was empty inside.

But, I’m learning how to fill her back up with self-compassion and lots of hugs.

I hope you are filling yourself back up, too.

Lots of love.

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I never would have classified myself as highly sensitive because I’m a pretty tough cookie. 

I also didn’t know what an empath was until my 30s, so I just thought that everyone could always feel what I feel, see what I see, hear what I hear and so forth.

I had NO CLUE that this wasn’t the case.

Hence, I now realize why I’m different than the majority of people who don’t fall into these two categories. 

What’s interesting is that there are people who are highly sensitive and others who are empaths and then there are highly sensitive empaths. And by golly, I’m swimming in the soup of the latter.

The Highly Sensitive Empath

Here are a few things I’ve learned about empaths throughout the years.

• Empaths absorb other people’s emotions. We’re highly attuned to what other people are feeling such as anger, anxiety, and negativity. This can be exhausting because we’re taking on what’s not ours!
• Empaths have highly sensitive senses.
• Empaths need a lot of alone time. Whether that’s going to a party by ourselves in our own car so we can leave when we need to or going on a vacation alone, we can’t always be around people because it’s too draining.
• Empaths reset ourselves when we’re immersed in nature.
• Empaths are highly intuitive.
• Empaths can get overwhelmed in intimate relationships.
• Empaths are usually introverted and prefer one-on-one relationships or small groups instead of being immersed in crowds such as the mall, concerts, and parties.

In many ways being a highly sensitive empath is a gift because my intuition is so strong that’s it’s alarming at times and I often just know things when others can’t see or hear or feel what I can. It’s almost like having a sixth sense that is built into me. I thought everyone had it but it turns out they don’t.

I tend to attract other people who are highly sensitive empaths because we tend to be interested in the same activities and the same things, which has been quite exciting and fun because it’s made me feel less alone and like an alien, thinking no one else feels as deeply as I do. 

Perhaps you can relate?

Protecting Your Energy

It’s taken me many years (36 to be exact) to learn how to protect my highly sensitive empathic self from other people, situations and events that are energy vampires and drain my energy. I’ve had to stop watching the news, stop reading the newspaper, stop listening to commercials on TV, stop watching scary movies/TV shows and so forth because the negative programming is so strong that it drains me like a dead battery. I’m sure many of you reading this understand while other people who aren’t empaths or who aren’t highly sensitive just roll their eyes because they can’t feel what we feel – perhaps their constitution is different and they have more armor than we do. 

Whatever the case may be for why some people feel deeper and have an inner knowing/intuition deeper than others, if you are a highly sensitive empath, it’s a wild thing to embody. While it is a gift because it helps us navigate our lives in a very clear way if we listen to what our body is trying to tell us, it can also be difficult because going to BBQs, concerts, weddings, parties, etc., can seem incredibly exhausting, draining and overwhelming. Learning how to manage this and make yourself a priority is key. KEY!

I recall an interview with Oprah and Amy Schumer (two women who we would think were outgoing and extroverted) and they talked about how they’re not extroverts at all. They went on to discuss how they’re sensitive to energy and too much stimulation that others find enjoyable. I could not agree more. I’m in their category for sure and you probably are too if you’re reading this!

The Empath & Adrenal Fatigue Connection

Most people think I’m an extrovert but as I slow my life down more and more, I realize I’m not. At all. I’m an introvert who needs so much quiet time… more than the average person. I need alone time and my nervous system can’t handle the constant pumping out of adrenaline/cortisol from being around people all the time. I wish I could. In my 20s and when I was younger, I was able to go go go, push push push. As I think back to those times, I was sensitive back then as well, but I didn’t listen to myself or my body and the signals it was giving me. I ignored every signal! I pushed through any headache, fatigue, pain, exhaustion, etc., and just kept going, which explains the adrenal fatigue I’ve had for years that sparked many of my health issues. 

It’s funny, isn’t it… how we’re not taught to listen to ourselves and the obvious signals from our bodies? Why is that? Why are we not taught this in school? I find that odd. I could have saved myself years of suffering from health issues if I had learned how to actually stop and realize I was burned out and to try to slow myself down. But no, I kept going and pushing harder and harder because as a society that’s what we’re taught to do: to push ourselves and keep going despite what symptoms pop up. We’re taught to band-aid our symptoms with a pill or a potion and hope for the best.

Sadly, that’s the quickest way to become unwell and burned out. What I didn’t realize at the time and which took me 12 long years to discover is that I had to go beyond healing the physical body to move deeper into the emotional layer of the body and finally into the energetic layer of the body for true health to manifest.

The highly sensitive empath, in my experience, is a part of the energetic layer, which was the most fascinating layer for me to work with. It’s taken time to deeply understand and embody this energetic layer through years of energy medicine and mind-body modalities as well as understanding the quantum physics about how we create our external reality based on our internal reality and our past traumas (painful emotional experiences). We are the creators of our lives and when you truly grasp this on a deep level, you realize that even as a highly sensitive empath, you can take back your power and create your life…and it all starts from within you, not from pushing or grasping for anything or anyone outside of you. This is internal power.

Thriving as a Highly Sensitive Empath

Despite being a highly sensitive empath, I’ve found a way to live and thrive in Manhattan that suits me. Now, Manhattan, NYC, is not the easiest place to do this folks, but if I can do it here, you can do this anywhere. I repeat ANYWHERE. I’m not out at bars or clubs or partying… that was never my scene. Instead, I take care of myself, I cook my meals, I say NO a lot. A whole heck of a lot. I get 8 hours of sleep. I surround myself with loving people who have my best interest in mind. I stopped being a people pleaser. I set strong boundaries with other people, my friends, and my family. I stopped pushing and started to trust life a bit more by BEING instead of DOING all the time. Was all of this change scary? You betcha. Did I lose friends? Yep. It was hard but I did it and so can you.

When I think about… “Amie Valpone slowing down?” That just doesn’t belong in the same sentence. But, I made it happen because if I didn’t slow down, take time away from social media and the non-stop pace of life, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. I made it work and my entire life has transformed because of it. 

So, no matter how sensitive you are, no matter how empathic you are, there are ways to pull yourself out of the craziness of life to get yourself to a more grounded place where you can feel like yourself instead of being pulled in a million and one directions. We’ll be diving into everything about empaths and being a highly sensitive person and how to manage it so it doesn’t negatively affect your health in my upcoming programs and events. Remember, you are the expert on your body. Healing yourself on the physical, emotional and energetic layers of your body means learning how to take your power back and stepping into who you’re meant to be. This starts with listening to yourself, slowing down your life to get still enough to hear what your body (and your racing mind) is telling you underneath all the busyness and to allow yourself to experience an energetic shift in your life. This, in turn, will allow you to start to become aware of the physical, emotional and energetic aspects of your life that are impacting you, draining your sensitive empathic self and most of all, being aware and conscious of your external reality as it reflects back to you this new state you’re embodying.

I hope you’ll join me. xx

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Shifting

There’s something about this time of year that makes me sit back and ask myself a bunch of questions about everything. I sort of think of this time of year leading up to September as a sort of semi-New Year more so than I do in January.

Perhaps it’s because of all those years of going back to school in September and starting a fresh year that makes it feel this way. I think that’s what it is. Perhaps you can relate? Even at 36 years old, I still feel like life is about to change and shift and start fresh in a few weeks for a whole new school year. You could say I keep myself on a ‘school calendar’ if you’d like, but perhaps that’s what keeps the child-like playfulness to my life.

The last few months of summer have left me feeling like a huge shift is happening in every area of my life. I’ve been feeling this way for a few months now but it seems every month brings about more awareness, more change, more shifts, more growth, more depth and more clarity. I believe a lot of this started when I began to feel better. When you’re cooped up for 12 years trying to survive and your only outlet is your work, doctors and sleep, you sort of end up in a life that feels like a horse with blinders on. It’s odd because when you’re in the thick of it, you don’t even realize you’re in it, but when you get out of it (and the unraveling process of getting out of it) you can’t help but wonder how much you didn’t see, feel, think, hear, smell, touch, etc. in life because you were so cooped up inside your own little world. Trauma is weird. It’s creepy in a way because we’ve all had traumatic situations in our lives but we brush them off as nothing, yet we carry around their emotional and energetic heaviness and wounds for years, sometimes lifetimes without realizing how much those situations shaped us and changed us.

Slowing Down

The shift I’m feeling in my life currently is the pull to slow down. I talked about this a few years ago in my feature about Why the Hustle Isn’t So Fabulous and I think that was the start of a spark inside of me to slow down. To slow my entire life down. Not just the running around to meetings. Not just the filling up my calendar. Not just trying to be everything for everyone. Not just the trying to do it all. But the deeper hustle- like not multi-tasking and actually being present when I’m working on something or writing this article or speaking with someone. I became really good at mutli-tasking. Really, really good. I’m sure you can relate. While it’s wonderful for getting stuff done, it messes with your life and actually makes me feel dizzy just thinking about it. It kept me in this loop of the trauma cycle (more on this coming soon) and completely out of my body always wanting to do, do, do and get more done and be more efficient and it totally whacked out my body and left me in a state of not being able to be present with people.

And right now, at this point in my life, what I want is to be more present, more grounded in myself, more self-aware because to me that’s the real growth in life. When we succumb to our knee jerk reactions and allow ourselves to be triggered by others (all of which just stems from our own childhood unmet needs) we feel out of sorts and discombobulated and our cortisol and adrenaline is sky high and our head is pounding and it’s a NIGHTMARE. Yuck. Not my cup of tea. Those days of getting ‘bent out of shape’ are over for me.

I’m slowing down everything. The way I food shop. The way I cook my meals. The way I have a conversation. The way I say, “NO” more. The way I spend more quality time with myself to reflect on the woman I want to be in my future and how I want to step forward into a new season and so much more.

Releasing and Letting Go

All I can say is that I feel such a release, a letting go, a deeper sense of relaxation in my nervous system, which is helping to speed up all the healing in my body. But most of all, I have peace of mind. I’m not endlessly scrolling through social media. I’m no longer trying to attend every event or gathering. I’m not feeling like I have to do it all. I’m just BEING and wow, what a shift. I’m not going to lie, a bit (and a lot) of anxiety pops up at first when you’re shifting because your nervous system is so used to going, going, going, going, going, going, going but when you sit with that resistance, it fades like the steam coming out of a tea kettle and what you find is stillness and peace underneath it.

Shifting doesn’t mean rushing or seeking advice from someone who is trying to squeeze you into a one-size-fits-all approach that isn’t addressing what you need. During my own journey, I felt every so-called “expert” I saw was trying to fit me into this boxed approach and sadly I started to rely on these “experts” as the authority and trusted their advice more than I trusted myself, which meant I lost complete trust over my own intuition and I also completely lost myself in the process. Yet what the process of unraveling myself has done for me is to teach me and guide me into who I truly am and to realize that the power is always inside of me, not in someone outside of me, as much as society tells us that’s the way to go. Do yourself a favor and begin to deepen the trust in yourself and get still, get quiet with yourself and allow yourself to shift slowly into the woman you’re meant to be. This is a shift in your energy and it begins with you.

Shifting is a beautiful thing. It can feel scary, sure, if you let it scare you. Or you can let life shift around you and let yourself flow with it instead of fighting against what life is trying to tell you.

Here’s what I do know about shifting and growing and change…it’s a slow process and it’s also a beautiful one filled with lots of signs throughout your day that you wouldn’t otherwise catch if you were busy going, going, going. Life is always trying to teach us something, to help us heal, to be a mirror for us to see our own unresolved fears that are reflected back to us and so much more…

So, this week, allow yourself some quiet time to think about the woman you want to be as you step into this new season/New Year and allow your life to shift with you instead of fighting whatever it is that’s happening. What you can’t see, yet is how whatever situation you’re in is bringing you to the exact place you’re meant to be. Trust that.

Enjoy these last few days of summer.

Much love,

-Amie

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