I Quit My Healing Protocols, Practices & Rituals

Personal Share: Stop fixing. Start living.

Unconventional opinions on health & healing

I’ve abandoned all my rituals. The practices and programs picked up to fix this and that — somehow rebalance my system, support my life, bring me back to wholeness.

This is silly. This idea that we’ve gone so far from a natural way of living that we have to actually schedule time from the living to do all these things so that we can feel good and right enough to get back to living.

I haven’t actually been deep in that trap of fixing for a long time. But I skim around the edges still, apparently.

Last winter was the most difficult time of my adult life. It impacted me deeply. And months after, I still felt the residue. My body was contracted. I was living in a state of unprocessed grief and fear.

I began to think I really needed to do something take care of myself, and this led to thinking I needed to work on my nervous system and the trauma. So I started. I’ve got the tools. I know the practices. And nothing shifted. It’s gonna take time, right? Healing doesn’t happen overnight. I hunkered down for the mission.

And then my 21-year-old daughter asked me to go climb a peak with her. We got up at 5:30 a.m. There went my slow-morning, nervous-system-friendly, trauma-healing embodiment routine.

I was jolted by so much movement so early. But we were on the trail long before anyone else, just us and the first soft rays of the sun and its candy-colored light on the mountain peaks. And as I was walking up that beautiful mountainside, the tears I hadn’t been able to shed for months started to roll down my face. There was no drama about it. They just spilled out with each step I took.

This. The body knows what to do. It always has. It’s literally made for it.

We got to the top and sat with our snacks, enjoying the view of the valley with its snake-like winding rivers below.

Me with my daughter — a young woman now — who I not only love but enjoy immensely, and who I credit with being the one that often (unknowingly) invites me out of my patterns of fixation and back into real living.

Me on the mountain, not just outside to “ground” or get UV to support my circadian rhythm — not hacks, not protocols, but a real, live human-animal being, moving her body in nature like God intended.

And when I got back from the hike — muscles both tired and wholly revitalized at the same time — all that “trauma” locked in my system had unraveled. Gone. Completely. Nothing to process. No hoops to jump through. Nothing to “heal.”

This lesson keeps coming back to me. I guess I learn it in layers, each one peeling away more of what was never real and bringing me closer to what is.

I did this when I moved from Montana to Florida and spent all day, every day, outside in the sun — and my depression disappeared. No therapy. No medication. Just sun.

I did this when we moved from a gated community in Florida to an off-grid container home in Hawaii with no walls and began to sync with nature. Asleep at dark, awake at first light. Wet when it’s wet. Hot when it’s hot. Cold when it’s cold. I don’t even know what kind of healing to call that, but I know it happened to all of us.

I watched the evidence. Stress melted out of my children that I didn’t even know existed. They became half-feral and ten times more alive. Me too. After years of trying to “heal” my way back into my body, I finally found myself there without effort.

I did this when I put everything I was doing down and laid in the grass for hours every day for a month, belly to belly with the earth — and repaired my nervous system, decades of chronic pain melting out of me.

All the big shifts, the big healings, the big transformations — they didn’t come from finding the “right” practice. They didn’t come from trying to fix something I thought was broken. They came from following that animal-body instinct that knows how to come back to homeostasis when the messages aren’t drowned out by all the other noise.

Humans have removed themselves from this intelligence, and then we think that same mind is going to get us back to wholeness. I’ve found that’s not true. It’s another thing that knows how to get there, but the cost is often the ideas I have about what I think I should do or how I think I should live.

I have to be willing to live in a really different way. And I already do. Sometimes I think that’s enough. But then this intelligence moves in and shows me something else that needs to get flipped on its head. Because the answer is usually something that goes against the norm. It’s completely outside the box. And humans are funny because as soon as we remove ourselves from one box we tend to put ourselves in another.

Our rational minds give us practices and protocols and endless attempts to control what we think is wrong — but this does something else. It speaks another language. A simple one.

What happens you stop trying to fix yourself?

We think if we’re not fixing, nothing will change. It’s not true. Because there is an intelligence that will aways bring us back to wholeness if we give it room to move us. And it works only when we lean into life, not away.

I didn’t need a soft morning practice to heal my nervous system. I needed more sunrise peak climbs at five a.m. with sweat dripping down my thighs.

I didn’t need a whole fascia protocol. I needed to stop asking my body to carry the burden of something I was too afraid to admit to myself.

I didn’t need to cycle-sync my workouts and track my biomarkers. I needed to eat more sugar. (Yes, that kind of sugar.)

I know nothing. But there is an impulse in me that does — if I listen.

Stop fixing. Start living more.

xx