Why Naturopathic Healing

I'm heading back to student clinic at the end of this month and it has been six months since I have been in the naturopathic clinic at uni due to the recent mandates, which have thankfully been dropped. It's been a long road to get to this point as I've been studying since I was pregnant with my second child in 2015 and I've been going ever since. I’ve had two babies since beginning my degree. 

So why Naturopathy? 

How did I come to this path? I get asked that often so I thought I would touch on my journey with you. And share why I am adding this into my work as an energy healer and intuitive and why have I been called to deliver this as part of my mission to help mums who are struggling within themselves whilst raising highly sensitive kids. 

When I was straight out of the school, I was actually on a path to becoming a vet. Now some of you may have read the book, Mother's Circle and had a little bit of insight into my story, but if you haven't, I was on my way to becoming a vet, a large animal vet in fact, working with horses and cows. But I really wasn't feeling connected to this in my heart. 

I remember one afternoon at uni, I was allowing myself some space to relax and I found myself meditating out in this quiet garden of oak trees out the back of uni. I was really allowing myself to just surrender all expectations of who I was and what I was supposed to be doing, with so much pressure on your back when you're on that sort of path. 

I was just allowing myself to drop into my dream state and I found myself following the oak trees. I followed them along the path and I ended up walking along the road and catching a tram then I ended up outside the Australian College of Natural Medicine. Back in 2007, a long time ago. 

And by following my dream state I ended up signing up to the Bachelor of Health Science Naturopathy, just signing up on the spot, even though I was already enrolled in this other course. 

I just really wanted to commune with the plants. I really wanted to be one with nature. I really wanted to be absorbed into the naturopathic principles as they are something I strongly resonate with. 

I was probably about a year into my naturopathic degree, back in 2007 and I ended up having to pause my degree because I wanted to move interstate to be with the boy I met on MySpace. Jarryd, my now husband, lived in Queensland and I lived in Melbourne. Intuition firing, I packed everything up and moved and that meant that I had to support myself living out of home. 

That meant that whilst I tried to keep studying my degree and doing it part time while trying to work and trying to live out of home for the first time I ended up doing really bad and failing a lot of subjects and you know when you're young and trying to do all of these things. It was just a bit too much. 

So I paused my degree, I deferred and I went and worked full time and tried to survive out in the big world and put it out of my mind. 

You know, I think that was a big blessing for me. I really needed life experience to truly appreciate the depth of knowledge that I was being presented with in this naturopathic degree. 

Because it wasn't just about the herbs. It wasn't just about learning the herbs. There were so many more layers. I loved the spiritual aspects. I flew through my psychology subjects and really loved absorbing all of the counseling work and then I discovered the deeper side of working with plants and homeopathy working with trauma and the deeper psychological emotions related to the physical and delving into all of that was really where I felt at home. 

But with the connection to nutrition and gut health, it was really something that I struggled to embody. I was still in that party girl mindset. I was very much in denial. I was living off cigarettes and Red Bull vodka, just trying to support my party lifestyle. 

When my eldest daughter was born, it snapped me out of that lifestyle. It was plugging a hole of disconnect within me, that lifestyle was filling a void with all of these addictions that were replacing my connection to self. 

When I had my daughter, I had to quit smoking, I wasn't drinking, I wasn't partying. I was having to be present with myself, with my emotions with her emotions and being present for her. I didn't have that crutch to numb out. I was really forced to acknowledge my shadow aspects of myself and what was been going on for me for my entire life. 

It was not only my own disconnect from the Spirit element, but every other element of earth, air, fire and water that does reside in me and keep me whole. 

With my fire element of my passions, creativity and ambition being put on hold, I was repressing my water element of my emotional body and my relationships were suffering. My air element of my mind was not being nourished, as I like to learn and get lots of information and I wasn't doing that, I wasn't studying anymore once I dropped out and I had unhealthy mindset patterns.

My earth element was not grounded, I was unregulated, stressed and on edge, my health was in decline and I was unaligned with my values, I had abandoned my rituals, my connection to spirit. 

I wasn't doing anything that was actually supporting myself to feel strengthened, empowered or whole. 

I really required a deep reboot that involved not only reweaving my daily rhythms but leaving behind the old paradigms that weren't working for my family values like leaving the corporate world of work, pulling my kids out of daycare and unschooling and returning to uni to study my passion. 

My reclamation of self required that deep reboot of our daily rituals, the daily habits that set up our foundation so that we could hold space for the more, challenging aspects of what we needed to truly find connection. 

We needed to get regulated and that required supporting our gut health and therefore our mental health, which are both a balancing act to achieve. 

When you've got a toddler who's used to eating sugar and processed foods and then being like, actually, this isn't going to work for us. We're going to take that back and we're going to do some gaps healing we're gonna do some broth and we can't have these things and completely changing the way that you've been living. It's really, really hard. 

We needed to establish the groundwork that supports us to be able to look at the harder things. To do that we needed to take some time to just be slow to just go within and just do things in a way that was really supportive to our own energy and our family dynamic. Sometimes that's just being really gentle with yourself as well. 

So a part of my reclamation of self came with re enrolling in my naturopathic degree when I was pregnant with my second child. I had a highly sensitive toddler and I was pregnant and navigating the birthing system in a time when I was breaking away from the mainstream ways of living which was was really, really challenging for me. 

My naturopathic degree opened me up to a lot of knowledge that I needed to holistically heal the connections within my family, with my daughter's anxiety with my own journey through depression and being failed by the system and feeling really unsupported through that. 

This degree really opened me up to the different elements within that I needed to be able to heal on a holistic level. How the nature of gut healing gives us the foundation or the strength within our bodies when we are healing inflammation, and if we are providing the body with the nutrients that it needs to build the neurotransmitters that it needs to focus the brain and help defog all of that energy.

The importance of quality sleep and deep rest which is such a struggle when we've got sensitive kids and when we're highly sensitive ourselves. Our sleep patterns can be so dysregulated and bringing that into balance is so nourishing. 

Connection comes from a regulated nervous system and a stable base chakra energy. And this comes from stable foundations of gut health, immune health, nervous system health, hormonal health and psychological health. 

For this we need the balance of our elemental bodies of earth, air, fire, water and spirit but also needs to consider what you're feeling in your body with the food you consume as well as the chemicals that are around you in your home and in the environment and the water that you drink. 

There's so many different elements that are impacting why we struggle with highly sensitive natures and it's not something that is wrong with us, but it's something that highly attuned sensitive bodies really struggle to process. The extra toxicities within the environment, within food, within the society that's not supportive of the way that we need to live. 

There’s a complete reboot that needs to happen and that's not something that can happen quickly. It's not something that you can just go okay, I've decided that I'm going to be this natural crunchy mama now, and I've got to stop doing all of these things… that's not going going to be fair, especially for the children, if you're taking away so many things that they’re used to, that's going to be really harsh on their base chakra energy as well, because they've been used to these things. They've formed habits around these things and they feel safe with these things that are familiar to them. And when we take that away then they feel like they're exposed and vulnerable and they don't have anything that's safe that they can lean on. 

That’s where they need us as well to just move it slowly. Do it one thing at a time. Take small steps and make small changes. This is why I believe that adding in this naturopathy degree to my energetics therapy is so nurturing because it is helping you to build the foundation of health that is around gut health, clearing out inflammation, providing the right nutrients that the brain needs to be able to function in a way that is supportive and nurturing for the child and for the family.

The holistic view takes into consideration the struggles, the stresses, as well as any trauma. Taking into consideration the mindset and emotional attachment that our energetics and emotions have on the physical. 

All of these elements woven into a big bundle and held for you in the healing relationship that you don't get with mainstream health practitioners when you only get 15 minutes with them to try and combat one health thing at a time. It’s not a symptomatic approach. It's a root cause approach which really ties in beautifully with the energetics of working with deep seated, energetic and emotional ties, whether that be to things that have happened in this lifetime or lifetimes passed or down the ancestral lineage. 

It's always interwoven together. This is a really nurturing way to be able to create that holistic care package. For you. 

So this is the reason why I found naturopathic healing to be so important on my healing journey to be able to use plants as medicine, through not just the food you eat but the herbs that you take as your medicine and the flowers that we take as the essences to help heal the emotional and energetic bodies. To live in alignment with the seasons, our rhythms, the circadian rhythms of rising with the sun and when to sleep and moving with the moon and our menstrual cycles to keep your rest in check. All of these things are so interwoven for our holistic self care, nurturing health prevention of disease.