What Wellness Culture Gets Wrong About High Vibes Only

[00:00:00] Hey there and welcome to Heal with Grace. I'm your host Grace Secker
[00:00:04] and I'm a holistic licensed therapist and nervous system coach who believes that the chronic and often unseen symptoms
[00:00:10] you're living with are a sign of something deeper going on. A sign that your nervous system needs attention. In each episode
[00:00:17] I'll share the science behind the most common chronic health disorders plus holistic health tips using mental physical and spiritual practices.
[00:00:25] You'll hear what I've learned in my journey and the true stories from our trusted guests
[00:00:30] so you can feel less alone in your experience and give yourself grace no matter what you're going through.
[00:00:35] So without further ado, settle in and get cozy. It's time to Heal with Grace.
[00:00:40] Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Heal with Grace podcast.
[00:00:46] Today, I'm diving into something a little vulnerable because I'm kind of going against something I've used before
[00:00:54] and I don't like to be wrong about things
[00:00:57] as a recovering perfectionist and the need to be right. But that's how we grow, right? So, hey, let me get myself situated here.
[00:01:08] So I've been doing a lot of processing and
[00:01:13] like on my own deep personal level as things have been coming up
[00:01:15] and I feel like I've kind of been hitting some new levels of healing and it's making me reflect back on what I have shared
[00:01:22] and what I've done previously. Not that what I think what I did was wrong
[00:01:26] not at all. Everything has been exactly what I needed to do because it's led me to my journey and led me to here.
[00:01:32] But I want to talk about something really nuanced. So I want to explore something that's come up a lot,
[00:01:39] especially in the work of people like Dr. Joe Dispinza, which I've mentioned many times on here
[00:01:44] and whose work I deeply respect and have benefited from.
[00:01:47] He has countless people and stories of people healing using his work.
[00:01:51] But the thing is the the idea that we can change our state of being rewire our brain and meditate our way
[00:01:56] into a new reality and then leave all the pain behind by aligning with a higher frequency
[00:02:02] is again, something I use.
[00:02:05] I also think there's something missing from it, which is what I have realized lately.
[00:02:10] And honestly, I'm all in the power of that.
[00:02:13] I've seen it work. I felt it work. I've used his tools myself and still do.
[00:02:18] I still use his meditations very regularly.
[00:02:21] But here's the thing that I think often gets left out, especially for those
[00:02:26] of us living with chronic symptoms, sometimes trying to jump into bliss
[00:02:33] bypasses the parts of us that are asking to be felt and to be met.
[00:02:40] The pain, the fear, the grief, the shame, the very things our nervous systems
[00:02:46] are wired to protect us from.
[00:02:49] So if we're looking at our state of being and moving into a higher state of being,
[00:02:56] if you will, or increasing our brainwave frequencies and increasing
[00:03:00] our heart centered space and really getting into ourselves, ourselves
[00:03:04] into that sympathetic, I'm sorry, parasympathetic nervous system,
[00:03:09] that aligning of energy, that's really wonderful.
[00:03:13] And I think that we can't forget that we also have to meet the pain.
[00:03:20] It needs to be met by ourselves and by loved ones and loved loving spaces
[00:03:25] so that it doesn't have to keep screaming at us.
[00:03:28] So let's first talk about the allure of the high vibes only
[00:03:33] because let's be real, visualizing a pain free life, sitting in gratitude,
[00:03:39] aligning your energy. That sounds incredible.
[00:03:41] And sometimes it is powerful.
[00:03:44] I've sat in meditations and truly felt a shift.
[00:03:47] I meditate every single day.
[00:03:49] I've had moments where my pain lessened just by being in a state
[00:03:52] of coherence or joy, just being with myself in meditation.
[00:03:56] That's why I lead meditation and practices like that over and over and over again.
[00:04:01] But when the symptoms would return, the fatigue would creep back in.
[00:04:05] And under all that effort to stay in high state,
[00:04:09] I started to feel this quiet inner tension,
[00:04:12] like I was skipping over something important.
[00:04:15] And to be honest, when I kept doing this meditation
[00:04:19] of trying to change my behavior, change my state of being
[00:04:21] it almost felt like, and this is just me, but it almost felt like
[00:04:24] there was kind of some shame coming in, like, oh, I shouldn't be
[00:04:27] feeling or thinking or doing these things instead of, oh, I'm choosing
[00:04:33] to feel or to be in a certain state of being instead of that one's bad.
[00:04:37] This one's good.
[00:04:38] Again, I think it's my personality characteristic to categorize good and bad.
[00:04:42] And maybe not everyone does that.
[00:04:44] But when we prioritize only positivity,
[00:04:48] we can unintentionally create an inner split.
[00:04:52] It's like a rejection of the parts of us that are struggling.
[00:04:55] And in the healing process, those parts don't need to be pushed away.
[00:04:59] They need to be met and heard and loved.
[00:05:05] The kind of bypassing we do when we try to just change our state,
[00:05:09] no matter how well intentioned, can become just another mask sometimes.
[00:05:14] And holding that mask in place takes so much energy
[00:05:18] and energy we could be using to actually feel, integrate and heal.
[00:05:22] So here's what we're actually avoiding.
[00:05:25] Our bodies are emotional pain, not metaphorically, literally.
[00:05:30] As Nicole Sacks says, we have an emotional reservoir.
[00:05:33] She's the creator of Journal Speak, by the way.
[00:05:37] And it's just a practice to journal out your emotions
[00:05:40] and really get to the parts of us that actually our nervous
[00:05:42] system or our symptoms are trying to protect us from.
[00:05:44] And when we have this emotional reservoir
[00:05:47] and if we're constantly trying to bypass what's present, the sadness,
[00:05:51] the fear, the anger, the grief that builds up in this reservoir
[00:05:54] in favor of something higher, we're not healing.
[00:05:57] We're avoiding.
[00:05:58] We're using spiritual tools to suppress
[00:06:01] what our bodies are begging us to feel.
[00:06:04] And I've learned this somewhat the hard way, kind of.
[00:06:07] I try it. It doesn't really work.
[00:06:08] And my body is like, no, get us into symptoms.
[00:06:12] And there was a point where I was doing everything right,
[00:06:14] meditating daily, listening to affirmations, writing gratitude lists,
[00:06:17] repeating mantras, doing right nervous system regulation practices.
[00:06:21] And I was still in pain.
[00:06:23] Actually, that's not totally true.
[00:06:24] My pain had really gone away.
[00:06:26] But fatigue, for me, is the last symptom
[00:06:29] that has just been a puzzle, to be honest.
[00:06:33] It's been a conundrum.
[00:06:34] But I've realized that I wasn't actually
[00:06:41] meeting those really deep, honestly, dark parts of me
[00:06:45] that needed to be met and needed to be felt.
[00:06:48] Because really, fatigue covers up so much pain and rejection
[00:06:53] and isolation and loneliness, not for every single person.
[00:06:57] You we all have our reasons for for symptoms coming on.
[00:07:00] But for me, I hadn't met the depths
[00:07:05] of my experiences, of my emotions.
[00:07:08] And it wasn't until I stopped trying to fix myself
[00:07:12] and instead started asking, what is this symptom trying to say?
[00:07:16] How can I just actually be with the scariness, the fear,
[00:07:21] the pain, the darkness that comes on when I'm in that state
[00:07:24] that something shifted?
[00:07:25] It wasn't about changing my state of being.
[00:07:27] It was actually just about being present with that part of me.
[00:07:31] Truly present, noticing when the resistance
[00:07:35] and the fear came up with that part.
[00:07:38] So when it's the part of me that feels fearful, scared,
[00:07:43] like I'm going to get something wrong,
[00:07:45] my brain sends signals of symptoms to push me down.
[00:07:48] And for a while, I mean,
[00:07:49] there's been all different kinds of symptoms in my life,
[00:07:51] but the one that has been really rampant
[00:07:56] was the fatigue.
[00:07:57] And so, you know, that emotional reservoir
[00:08:01] I was talking about, that Nicole Sachs talks about.
[00:08:05] Basically, it fills up over years, sometimes decades,
[00:08:07] with every time we swallow our feelings,
[00:08:09] with every moment we push something down
[00:08:12] because it wasn't safe to express, it gets stored in the body.
[00:08:15] And eventually it shows up as migraines, as gut issues,
[00:08:19] as back pain, as fatigue, as pelvic pain, whatever it is,
[00:08:22] the symptoms will differ, but the root is often the same.
[00:08:25] Something unfelt, something unseen
[00:08:27] because it wasn't safe to do so
[00:08:30] because we were never seen in it
[00:08:31] or we were ashamed for feeling something.
[00:08:33] And our nervous systems adapt around trauma and stress,
[00:08:36] but they don't forget.
[00:08:38] If we don't give those emotions space to move,
[00:08:40] they stay locked, they turn into symptoms.
[00:08:44] And when we start to dig into this
[00:08:47] emotional reservoir landscape, it can be scary.
[00:08:51] It can feel like opening a floodgate,
[00:08:53] but that flood isn't here to destroy us,
[00:08:55] it's here to cleanse us,
[00:08:56] to finally let go of what we've been holding onto.
[00:08:59] And really, not even just let go,
[00:09:02] but fully integrate the experience.
[00:09:04] And what I mean by that is that those experiences,
[00:09:08] the feeling of loneliness when you were a kid,
[00:09:11] the darkness of depression that you were never met in,
[00:09:17] the shame that you experienced because you had depression
[00:09:20] or because you had panic attacks, because you were anxious,
[00:09:23] because you felt too much.
[00:09:25] All of that has been shunned essentially.
[00:09:29] And what needs to happen is us to feel those parts of us.
[00:09:33] Think of every emotion as a part.
[00:09:35] You know, the movie, okay, y'all are seeing me
[00:09:43] in one of my quirks.
[00:09:44] I'm really bad with names, like names of movies,
[00:09:47] things like that.
[00:09:48] Is it called Let It Out?
[00:09:49] You know what I mean?
[00:09:50] The emotions movie with the emotions,
[00:09:52] with the little emotions going on in your head
[00:09:55] and your body, all of those, all of our emotions,
[00:09:57] all of our symptoms are parts of us
[00:09:59] and we need them to be met.
[00:10:00] We need to meet them without resistance.
[00:10:02] Even when resistance is there, that's okay too.
[00:10:06] But when we're able to do that,
[00:10:07] we actually integrate the emotion and the experience.
[00:10:11] It's not about like getting it all out
[00:10:12] because it's so toxic for our bodies.
[00:10:14] It's about being with that emotion,
[00:10:17] being with the sadness, the grief,
[00:10:18] even when it doesn't feel logical.
[00:10:20] Actually, more often than not, it might not feel logical.
[00:10:23] It might feel like, well, yeah, I had that experience
[00:10:26] or like, yeah, my parents were fine.
[00:10:28] They were always there.
[00:10:29] But when you look closer,
[00:10:31] you see that they were maybe physically there,
[00:10:33] but emotionally they didn't know how to cope with their own
[00:10:37] so they weren't able to help you.
[00:10:39] Maybe you were left alone a lot.
[00:10:41] And again, maybe it wasn't a big deal in your head,
[00:10:44] but you then were never taught
[00:10:47] how to manage your own self, your own emotions.
[00:10:49] Emotional health is so, so important
[00:10:53] and we dismiss it so often,
[00:10:55] but it leads to so much disease.
[00:10:58] If we do not, not only physical disease, mental disease,
[00:11:01] if we don't learn how to be with our own experiences
[00:11:04] and emotions in life.
[00:11:05] And so to integrate means to allow them to flow within us
[00:11:09] and to flow through.
[00:11:11] Real healing doesn't always mean
[00:11:13] just floating into this quantum field
[00:11:17] that the high lives only is kind of in, which again,
[00:11:20] I am totally all about,
[00:11:22] I don't talk about it as much on here,
[00:11:23] but I'm all about different realms and spirituality
[00:11:27] and understanding the quantum field
[00:11:28] and bringing yourself into a state of being.
[00:11:31] 100% great, but we cannot forget
[00:11:35] about our emotional integration, our trauma integration.
[00:11:40] For me, I needed to go through crying on the floor,
[00:11:44] rage journaling.
[00:11:46] It looked like letting my body be
[00:11:49] in a really detrimental fatigue state
[00:11:53] to be with it, to see it,
[00:11:56] to not fully merge with it and see it as me,
[00:11:59] but see it as a part of me and feel it, let it flow through.
[00:12:04] It looked like for me being triggered
[00:12:06] and instead of running from it, leaning into it,
[00:12:09] really holding myself in the activation and the trigger
[00:12:13] and knowing I can be with myself through it
[00:12:16] no matter how much fear is coming up.
[00:12:18] Healing looks like connecting with your inner child,
[00:12:21] the younger version of me
[00:12:23] that never got to express her fear or her anger
[00:12:26] because it wasn't okay, never heard, never had space to
[00:12:30] and really letting her speak.
[00:12:32] So healing can look like somatic work, breath work,
[00:12:36] therapy and quantum healing and high vibe states.
[00:12:41] We just cannot ignore the emotional integration
[00:12:45] that is needed.
[00:12:47] And that can be really inconvenient sometimes.
[00:12:50] That real state, that real healing
[00:12:53] doesn't always fit neatly into a morning routine
[00:12:56] or a journal prompt,
[00:12:58] but it is realness that ultimately sets us free.
[00:13:01] So if you've tried to heal through meditation
[00:13:05] and it didn't work,
[00:13:06] and even if it made things a little better,
[00:13:10] I want you to know that you're not failing
[00:13:13] and if you've been on this journey for a while
[00:13:14] and you've seen some change
[00:13:15] but you're still kind of working at it,
[00:13:17] there's probably deeper layers
[00:13:20] and it might just mean that your body is asking you
[00:13:23] to go to those places.
[00:13:25] So let yourself feel some of the stuff
[00:13:28] you've been trying to avoid.
[00:13:31] Let yourself break it down.
[00:13:32] Let yourself be real
[00:13:34] because on the other side of that
[00:13:36] is something more powerful than any visualization.
[00:13:39] It's true integration.
[00:13:41] It's knowing that your body,
[00:13:42] your brain does not have to protect you
[00:13:44] from the emotions and the experiences
[00:13:46] that you've had in the past
[00:13:48] that were too much for them.
[00:13:50] You're in the present, we're in the present.
[00:13:52] We can be with what we have, what is needed here
[00:13:55] and now we don't need to be in the past
[00:13:57] but that's what our body thinks where we are.
[00:14:00] Integration means we take the pain and we give it space.
[00:14:04] We process it, not just with our minds
[00:14:06] but with our bodies and we stop fighting ourselves.
[00:14:10] And when we do that, something opens up.
[00:14:13] Healing becomes a byproduct of our honesty,
[00:14:16] our true honesty with ourself.
[00:14:18] And when that honesty meets compassion,
[00:14:21] that's where the real transformation begins
[00:14:23] because you're no longer at war with yourself.
[00:14:26] I was just talking with a client
[00:14:28] in the Mind, Body, Healing Method program.
[00:14:30] We were on our individual call,
[00:14:32] which everyone gets an individual call in the program
[00:14:35] and we really started to unlock.
[00:14:38] Again, it's not logical.
[00:14:41] It's actually very, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
[00:14:43] I mean, it kind of does
[00:14:44] but it feels like a stretch sometimes
[00:14:46] where you're like, okay, yeah,
[00:14:48] I was lonely a lot of the time as a child
[00:14:50] and I was bored a lot.
[00:14:53] And now it doesn't feel safe to rest.
[00:14:56] It doesn't feel safe to be bored
[00:14:57] even though I really want to.
[00:14:58] She was kind of in this middle zone.
[00:15:01] And we realized that fatigue was sending her,
[00:15:04] she was having symptoms, not just fatigue,
[00:15:05] but symptoms sending her into that state of being
[00:15:10] where she doesn't have to necessarily be bored
[00:15:13] but she also can't be busy
[00:15:16] because she's dealing with symptoms.
[00:15:18] Symptoms are really protective.
[00:15:20] They just want to help.
[00:15:21] And so we're diving deeper into understanding like,
[00:15:25] what is there?
[00:15:26] How could she be with those parts of herself and meet them
[00:15:29] so that they don't have to completely overtake her?
[00:15:32] And what she realized was,
[00:15:34] instead of just letting the fatigue overtake her,
[00:15:36] she was with it.
[00:15:37] She sat up, she's able to be with it, lean into it,
[00:15:41] tell herself, it's okay to be tired.
[00:15:43] I can still show up tired.
[00:15:44] I can still be here tired.
[00:15:47] And after sitting here with it, it started to lift.
[00:15:51] It started to go away and she can move throughout her day.
[00:15:54] There's so much power in meeting ourselves
[00:15:57] because our symptoms take us away from ourselves.
[00:16:01] So if this is something that you feel like is missing
[00:16:05] in your journey and you're like,
[00:16:06] I've done the somatic practices,
[00:16:08] I've done things, I've done the brain training,
[00:16:10] I don't really understand why,
[00:16:12] and what's still underneath, what's here?
[00:16:16] Then I invite you to book an onboarding call
[00:16:20] to apply for the Mind Body Healing Method
[00:16:23] because this is really my mission
[00:16:25] to help people understand what's underneath
[00:16:27] and to be able to meet it in a safe way.
[00:16:30] So if you are interested in joining our group
[00:16:33] and getting individual support throughout it,
[00:16:36] go ahead and find the link below, sign up for a call
[00:16:40] and we can help you get started.
[00:16:42] This work is hard to do alone.
[00:16:45] You're not supposed to do it alone.
[00:16:47] So surround yourself with people who get it,
[00:16:51] people who allow you to be messy.
[00:16:53] This is slow, it doesn't have to be always slow,
[00:16:55] but it's deep work and it lasts
[00:16:57] because you're not building on top of a shaky foundation,
[00:17:00] you're rebuilding from truth.
[00:17:03] So remember, you don't have to just automatically
[00:17:06] feel better to heal, you don't have to be
[00:17:07] in this like crazy high vibe state to heal,
[00:17:10] you have to feel more fully to heal.
[00:17:14] And sometimes that means going straight into the emotions,
[00:17:17] you spend a lifetime avoiding.
[00:17:21] So thank you for listening.
[00:17:23] If this episode resonated with you,
[00:17:25] please share it with someone who needs to hear it.
[00:17:27] And remember that healing is not linear
[00:17:30] and it definitely isn't always pretty,
[00:17:32] but it is possible.
[00:17:34] One honest moment at a time.
[00:17:37] Take care of yourself.
[00:17:38] I will catch you next time and keep healing with grace.
[00:17:43] If this podcast means something to you,
[00:17:45] it would mean so much to me
[00:17:46] if you could do these couple things.
[00:17:48] One, go to the heal with grace show page
[00:17:50] wherever you listen and tap the plus sign
[00:17:52] or click on the follow button
[00:17:54] so you don't miss an episode.
[00:17:55] It helps both of us out.
[00:17:57] While you're there, if you could get a five star review
[00:18:00] so that this podcast can reach more people,
[00:18:03] it would mean so much to me
[00:18:04] so I can continue sharing episodes
[00:18:06] that help you as well as others.
[00:18:09] Thanks for listening
[00:18:09] and I hope this brings you hope on your journey.