One of the things people often ask me is about how aromatherapy, shamanic healing or energy work fits in with the NHS and medicine in its Western sense. Isn’t it a bit woo woo? For me, they are very different fields but the more we can entwine them and see the commonality and the benefits of using both for what they do best, amazing things can happen.
For example, I have had operations and tests done at the doctors and hospital, and been given amazing things I never would have thought were possible. When I took my left foot hanging off me and the thought of losing it completely to Wythenshawe hospital, I was in absolute awe of what they did in surgery. Yet I went from being relieved to thinking what now? It was like it had been sewn up and I did not know how to approach it now. To be honest, I felt a sense of rejection towards it like I didn’t want it to be part of me.
What really broke me was not being able to talk to anyone about the trauma of the injury and come to an understanding of what it had done to me physically and energetically. How part of me had been lost, part of my soul essence and I had shut down. I only realised this years later. I have since talked to people who have been saved from near-death experiences and spoken of being ‘grateful’ for being saved but on some level feeling like they deserved to die. The soul has a whole different way of responding to these things.
I was equally grateful for the safe arrival by C-section of my daughter, how decisions are made based on statistics and evidence. It is truly amazing how small the scar is and how the body recovers. I got a healthy daughter yet I wonder had I trusted myself more if I would have hired a private midwife and attempted a breach birth.
Something, however stirred in me through having these experiences and it is something like: I don’t trust myself or I don’t feel connected with my body. This was the beginning, noticing something else in my body beyond the physical, something energetic, like words and stories being told, energy, the limbic system, the emotional memories stored. I became really fascinated about this. How sometimes my body would freeze or hold in certain situations or places with echoes of events past. Even if my mind had moved on somehow, my body was telling a different story.
This is really the basis of my work and what inspired my training. It is learning to bring the soul closer and bring yourself back. I work a lot with people who have been in accidents, my massage work brings me to really connect with scar tissue and connect it back to the owner with love. My chakra healing is about owning and taking charge of the energetic space in your body and feeling at home there. Not outsourcing confidence or connection with yourself.
So from the surgeries I experienced as miracles, my journey started when I seemed to activate a self-healer inside of me and this is what I teach my clients. I teach them to become that person when they need it as no one knows you better than you.
So it lead me to overcome injuries, bring back soul essences to become more ‘whole’ and express them though dance, writing, poetry and painting. However your story gets to be expressed is not important but the soul will understand it better when you use the creative parts of your brain. It is more ‘soul speak’.
Last year, when I gave birth to my third child aged 42 I was told I wouldn’t be able to have a home birth and this was too risky and it would likely be another c section. I couldn’t go over 40 weeks as my placenta was old. This didn’t resonate with how I felt about my body, as the pregnancy progressed, I realised that being in hospital again for a birth would likely bring about a trauma response in my body and that I would feel much safer at home. My son was born in his amniotic sac at home in the arms of my partner. I felt safe and my body opened. I knew there was wisdom in that.
If something happened to make me uncertain, I would have gone straight to hospital but tuning into the emotional journey as well as the physical is I believe the next step for medicine.
Tuning into the emotional journey can really aid recovery. I have used aromatherapy blends with clients who have suffered burns, had hip operations and hysterectomies. Being held and honoured and understood in your medical journey is so important and often after all else fails, emotions are the untapped resource. When you are supported, you can really support yourself.
So when the world is very good at dividing things into one way or the other. The answer, very often, is simply: both.