Holistic Health Checklist: How Healing Happens. (1/2, EP5)

Holistic health and wellness, healing fundamentals, and daily life hacks, in a quick summary + plug-and-play checklist. What is the underlying mechanism of resilience and healing, and how can we increase our capacity through easy small changes in our daily habits and routine?

This episode first explains the formula for resilience and healing, and then begins the 2-part series of the "Holistic Health Checklist". Today we cover physical, mental, and emotional well-being "life hacks", and next week we'll finish emotional and then cover relational, energetic body, and spiritual levels.

This podcast series is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology and healing work. This and the next episode cover the fundamentals - reminders we could all use, AND, great for people new to this kind of work. Who in your circle could benefit? Please share!

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2:07 - How Healing Happens

11:05 - Intro to checklist

11:52 - PHYSICAL WELLNESS

12:24 - Sleep

13:14 - Nutrition

14:05 - Nature

15:07 - Movement - for physical, emotional, energetic

18:01 - Movement - for the psyche

20:11 - Breath

21:49 - MINDSET: Language

25:06 - Mindset: Affirmations

26:04 - EMOTIONS (Part 1)

Note: for a deeper dive into resilience and healing stay tuned for the episode "Trauma and Resilience" coming out in a few weeks.

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Keywords:

Meditation, consciousness, esoteric wisdom, nonduality, spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, mindfulness, psychology, ego-death, meditation, new age, bhakti, buddhism, christianity, hinduism, indigenous wisdom, energy healing work, ancient wisdom, sangha

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Click "Follow" to receive future episodes, released weekly.

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Transcript

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You know when you're eating cereal and you have this conundrum where you're done eating the cereal, but there's still milk, right? And so then you pour in a little bit more cereal to even it out so that you can use the milk that's there, but now there's too much cereal, so now you need to add more milk, right? Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. In this episode, we're going to talk about how healing happens, and this episode is also going to be what you could call a wellness checkup. Okay? So in the beginning it's gonna be theory, and then the rest of the episode, it's going to be very tangible. I'm gonna give you a checklist with different categories of holistic health and wellness, from physical to psychological to relational a nd spiritual And here we can consider, what on this list am I doing? What can I do more of so that I make sure that I'm pulling all the lovers that I can. In my own daily life to provide myself with the resource, with the support, with the influx of good vibes that can help me either get through a time of difficulty or go from feeling good to feeling super awesome. Okay, so if you have a little, pen and paper, or if you wanna write some notes on your phone towards that part of the episode, we're gonna do a drive by of a lot of ideas of things that hopefully you are already doing, but you can start finding places where you could improve. Okay? So first let's start with the theory and then we'll go into our little checkup. So, how does healing happen? First, let's talk about what healing is and then we'll talk about the mechanism that it can happen through. Right now we're gonna define it as there is something that we need to deal with. That is in the way of our full sense of wholeness and wellness. And wellbeing. It is some kind of a pain that has lodged itself in high likelihood, emotional, mental, and energetic bodies. And it's there until we have the capacity to deal with it. So when we go through a hard time, we can either handle this live in the moment as it is originating or we're then if we can't handle it, we're then carrying stuff from the past that's waiting for our capacity to meet it and integrate it at some point in the future when we have gained that capacity. So whether it's from a current situation and you're dealing with resilience on the spot, or whether we're talking about healing from something that we've been carrying, doesn't matter. Same mechanism. So what is the difference between something becoming a trauma or remaining a trauma in comparison to something being able to metabolize all the way through and be healed? The difference is our capacity for resilience and for meeting whatever that difficulty is. We're gonna be quick on the theory part of this. So to go deeper into theory, please go to the Trauma and Resilience episode that's gonna be coming out soon. Because this one's gonna be more about actionable steps. So really quick, I'm going to share right now the theory that I call, I randomly made this up one day, the cereal and the milk. Okay? So I'm gonna tell you about cereal and milk and then we're gonna get to how it's a metaphor for healing. You know when you're eating cereal and you have this conundrum where you're done eating the cereal, but there's still milk, right? And so then you pour in a little bit more cereal to even it out so that you can use the milk that's there, but now there's too much cereal, so now you need to add more milk, right? And so there's constantly this thing of wanting there to be the right ratio. And when there isn't the right ratio, you either need to put in one or the other. Okay? So we're gonna use this metaphor as the ratio between the fact that when healing happens, it's because there is enough resource present for the difficulty to be metabolized. So three concepts here. One, there is a difficulty, which is an incoming stimulus into your psyche and your nervous system and your energy body. That stimulus can be like, oh, there is a natural disaster in my neighborhood and the roof of my house just flew off. Or, that stimulus can be, someone made a snide remark at me in the supermarket aisle, or that stimulus can be, I just woke up from a bad dream, or I just had a scary thought. Okay, it can be big or small. It can come from the outer world OR our inner world. That's an incoming stimulus. That's what I'm calling a difficulty or a challenge. The other thing that I named was resource. Resource is simply anything and everything that's healthy, that helps us feel what I would say to children. Big and strong and happy. So what helps us feel empowered, embodied. In our heart, in truth, spiritual truth, what helps us feel healthy? What helps us feel our true nature and what helps us have coherence, a regulated nervous system, and be in our spiritual empowerment to be able to help ourselves? Okay? The checklist that we're about to do is all of the things that increase that strength. That strength is what I'm calling basically, the milk in comparison to the cereal, which is the difficulty, okay? And the milk or that strength is our capacity for resilience. Meaning the more strength we have, the more resource we have, the more that bucket is filled with good vibes, strength, the more we are able to handle difficulty. So this gets us to our third concept, which is the alchemy between the two. There is an alchemy that happens when light and dark meet, in this case, when the light of awareness meets the darkness of ignorance, or for our metaphor, when there is a good ratio between the milk and the cereal, when there is enough milk to handle the cereal, when there is enough resilience to handle the difficulty, when there is enough light to handle the dark. Same thing, different words, always the same meeting that I'm talking about here, between a difficulty that comes up and our capacity to handle it. Now, this alchemy, the third concept is this alchemy, which is the relationship between. The resilience that we have and the difficulty that we are metabolizing. The word metabolizing or the word integration or the word alchemy are descriptors of this magic that happens, this transformation, this shift, this change, this healing that happens when the ratio between light and dark, between capacity and difficulty between awareness and ignorance between strength and wounding. When that relationship is at a good ratio, what's the good ratio? I completely made this up, but let's just say you need 51% good vibes, and 49% can be difficulty, pain, wounding, et cetera. This is an arbitrary number, but it's to help us remember that you always need the majority, at least 51%. That's the minimum. It's a majority stake. You need the majority stake to be. Resilience, strength, spiritual empowerment, groundedness, open-heartedness, health, safety, support from others, et cetera. That whole bucket, which we are about to do a checklist about so that we can then say, oh, how can I fill my bucket even more? How can I bring health, wellbeing, joy, and resilience even more to my daily life so that I can handle either the small stuff or whatever really big stuff might be currently happening or might have, trauma from the past or might come up in the future. So our job is not to see the pain and run from it, but to see the pain and gain the capacity to handle it. There is a saying out there that says, don't ask for a lighter burden, but for a stronger back. So if you're carrying a heavy backpack, it's not about, oh, lighten my load. It's about make me stronger and more capable of carrying it. So that's what we're talking about here. This is power because rather than feeling victim to what's happening and feeling like the outer world needs to change in order for us to be okay, meaning rather than wanting to calibrate the outer world to the current capacity that we have, and then constantly feeling annoyed that it's not happening'cause we can't control it anyway. Instead, we are gonna calibrate ourselves to what happens to be on our plate that we need to handle. So we are, it's two variables, right? You can either change the incoming stimulus, surprise, you actually can't, but everyone tries to, or you can change who you are in terms of your capacity to handle it. That is what we actually are not usually strengthening at our highest capacity possible. That's where a true empowerment is. Everyone is focusing on trying to change the stimulus instead. I don't like how that person acts. I don't like how it feels to live in this city. I don't really like the stresses of my job. I get that. That stuff can be burdensome. But the point is, we often don't have the capacity to change any of that, but that's where everybody focuses. Why? Because they're looking at the ratio of the cereal and the milk and they're like, oh, I wish there was less cereal, but the cereal's already in the plate. So it's, we don't have to fight against that or victimize ourselves against it. We can actually realize that we can add more milk. We have that capacity. There's always more that is available to us in our own self-empowerment and in our own growth of our own resilience and our capacity for self-healing. That is the good news so whenever we are going through a situation of difficulty at any level, then we can look at how can I increase my resilience, my healing capacity, how can I add more milk? Now we're going to go through the list of categories, okay? Health, mind, emotion, relationship, energetic, health, and spiritual. Where in each of these categories, I'm going to give ideas of things that you can do or areas to check whether you are experiencing, let's say a, a high state of wellbeing within those categories. And here's where you can write notes, okay? We wanna look at which tools have you not been using that you could use right now. Which levers have you not pulled that you could actually pull right now that would help you? And this is not an exhaustive list, so if you have other ideas, please add them. Hopefully this can be inspiring for you to think of more. Okay. Here we go. So let's start with health. Let's start with the physical body. This is always number one, always because this is our foundation. If we are not tending to our foundation and we're not feeling good, and we're like, I wonder why I am not feeling good, and we try to do all of these deep, esoteric things to help ourselves, but really what we need to do is get a good night's sleep. Then we're sabotaging ourselves because we need to go to the root of how we can help ourselves. That sometimes is actually so simple. So let's go here. Sleep and circadian rhythm. Are you getting enough hours? Are you going to bed and waking up at a time that's actually good for your body? How can this improve? What are the natural ways that you can improve your circadian rhythm without something like pharmaceuticals, for example? There are a lot of natural things you can do. Sunlight in the morning, not blue, light in the evening, how to increase cortisol in the morning and melatonin in the evening, et cetera. This is a whole world. You can go look it up if this is something that interests you. Next, water, hydration. What can you do? What are little hacks that you can do of putting water around the house in different ways or having a different type of water bottle or whatever it is in your routine where you can actually drink more water? It feels obvious and simple, but most of us actually don't do it. Next, nutrition and diet. Are you getting the vitamins and minerals that you need? Are you listening to your body when your body says, I'm hungry for something specific. And you can let yourself feel what you have in the fridge and let your body say, oh, right now I really want peanut butter. Or Right now I really want something citric like orange juice. Your body knows what it's lacking, and if you listen to it, it will tell you what it wants to eat, or I really want blueberries. Your body actually knows what vitamins and minerals are in these things that it's lacking, that it's needing, and we can go get a checkup and do a blood panel or whatever and find out if we have any deficiencies and how to help ourselves through our diet, as well as whatever vitamins we might wanna take next, time in nature. How often are you leaving the building? If you work indoors, which most of us do, how often are you putting your bare feet in the grass, soil, or sand? How often are you in direct contact with sunlight and fresh air? And what can you do? What is one simple step that you can do that can improve or increase any of those things? This is crucial for our physical health and energetic, emotional, and spiritual health. This isn't just a vacation thing or a weekend thing, so we need to prioritize this. It's not an extra fluff. It's not like cool and easy for the privileged people. It's every single person absolutely needs this. How can you get to a park? How can you get to a tiny little area with grass to be able to, to have some time where your bare feet can touch the earth? Next, physical movement. Everybody knows that we need to get exercise, but we're gonna break down physical movement a little bit more. We're gonna do three categories. The first one is gonna be stretching and creating movement that helps our fascia and that helps our lymphatic system. So when we wake up in the morning, our fascia has been hardening overnight because our body has been probably in the same position for many hours. When our fascia is hardened, our thoughts become hardened. We need to stretch in the morning to move that to already open ourselves and bring our flexibility back, both physically and mentally. When we move, our lymphatic system moves. If we don't move, our lymphatic system does not have its own pump. This is why little trampolines for adults is now in style. This is why in Qigong, there is a practice where you literally just stand up and shake whatever your thing is. It's about movement for both flexibility and for getting all the juices in your body to be able to move and go where they need to go. And as everybody knows, movement helps us move our emotions. And that type of movement could be something like dance or it could be working out. Let's look at working out really quickly because depending on what we do, it'll affect our body differently. And, all working out is not the same. So cardio and weights affects us physically very differently and we need both. For example, doing weights helps your bones, cardio will help your heart rate. And certain types of physical movement will meet your emotional body in different ways. If you are pulling weights, like let's say on the erg, on the rowing machine, that's a pulling action That's very different from pushing weights. There are other machines where you push, or even pushups. You don't even need machines or weights or a gym. You can use your body. You can Google all of the ways that you can use your own body with no equipment to be able to give yourself a workout that you can do free and quickly and at home. Now, there's one more category about movement that's very important, which is the movement practices that are created through lineage as holistic practices. The most well known would be yoga and Tai Chi and Qigong. Those practices, some people are like, oh, but they're so slow. I don't get a real workout. Then do your physical workout and do this as your spiritual movement practice. Because what this does is it moves your energy body, it clears centers and grounds your energy body through these physical movements. It's not only about the physical. The whole point is that the physical is the opportunity for the movement and the clearing and the opening of the energetic. One more thing about movement, actually, one more. There are movements that are. Let's say more structured and there are movements that are more spontaneous and flowing. For example, doing weights or doing a specific yoga pose is all structured, dancing, stretching randomly. All of that is organic. So just like I said, with eating, we can open the fridge and we can feel, oh, my body really wants blueberries right now. There is an organic need for us to listen to our body and allow our body to move in natural ways that it just wants to move in. If you see a little kid who's rolling around on the floor they're naturally following whatever it is that they feel like. Adults are used to sitting, standing, walking, and laying down as their four main movements. What happened to stretching in funny directions, or moving our hips, or moving our shoulders or lifting our arms above our head, or twirling ourselves in a circle, et cetera. All those things allow for our energy body to become more free and more flexible because when our movement is always in very regimented ways, our mind follows it. So think about soldiers, think about marching bands. Think about all of this, you know, Mao Zedong's China, where everyone is standing in equidistant rows and marching in the exact same way. You are physically creating what the psyche is then going to follow. So for those who maybe want more discipline, who are needing. Structure in their lives. Creating structured movement might actually be helpful for those who are already feeling kind of rigid internally and are needing to free themselves mentally and emotionally. Movement that is free, like dancing, can actually be really beneficial. If you feel awkward dancing, it probably means that you need to do it because there's something in your psyche that's repressing you from that level of freedom and flexibility on the psychological level. And it's revealing that repression in the physical as well. So if we allow ourselves movement in the physical, it can actually help that movement happen in the psychological. So one more thing in the category of health would be Breath. Now. Breath is so highly overlooked because it's so simple because we're always doing it and because people don't realize how big of a deal it actually is. Learning how to breathe correctly can change your life. So what happens when we inhale and our belly gets bigger rather than our belly getting smaller when we inhale? That is the correct thing to do is when you inhale, your belly should actually be getting bigger'cause there is air inside of you. When your belly is smaller, that's likely because you're doing a a tight upper upper body inhale only. We want our inhales to be long and deep. We wanna fill our lungs completely. We don't wanna do the shallow breathing. Think about a time of stress or when someone is scared or they're trying to run away from the tiger, metaphorically. Hopefully only the breath is fast and it's high up in the lungs. When we are relaxed, in order to relax our nervous system, we want our breath to be long and we want it to fill our entire lungs front, back, left, right, all the way down. So the more that we can practice long and full breaths as something that we do when we're waiting in line at the checkout counter, when we're in the elevator, when we are brushing our teeth, whatever it is, that is your little parts of your routine. The whole point is to embed as much as possible any of these ideas whenever you can into the routine that you already have so that you don't feel like there are extra things that you need to add to your schedule. We literally breathe all the time, so the more we can be conscious about it, the more we can do it in a way that actually regulates and calms our nervous system. Okay, now I'm gonna go to the next category, which is the category of mind healthy mind. One thing I'll say right now with the mind is learning how to catch negative language in our thoughts and in our words when we're talking out loud, and to reroute it towards generative creative, self-loving language. So for example, how often are you using the word, but. Can you remove the word but from your vocabulary and insert the word, and instead just try it and see what happens. How often do you say the words I can't? And how can you replace that with, well, in the past I had difficulty with it, And let's see what we can do now. Or I may need help with this, or this is something that I'm still learning, et cetera. So we're not lying. We're not denying, but we're taking something and we're slightly improving our lens, our optimism, our self-love, so that we are saying it in a way that is creating the reality that we are choosing to live in, rather than some default reality of a feeling of lack, scarcity, incompetence. Aloneness, et cetera, that your language is constantly reinforcing. So right now, we're changing our language as a way to change the way that we see and to add more positivity to our mentality. Okay? The more that we focus on changing our language, the more that we're able to become conscious of something that was probably out of our conscious awareness before. It creates a new level of mindfulness around our mentality in general, which is great. Let's give another example. Are you saying the words always and never? You always do this. You never do this, right? If you're complaining to, your spouse who doesn't wash the dishes, you never wash the dishes, or you're always late, first of all, nobody likes to be talked to like that, and you're creating circumstances that don't include flexibility. So you're limiting your own reality by thinking that something is always gonna be the way that it is. So where can you get out of that thinking and create a reality for yourself where we can understand that the future is still open and full of possibility? Here's another way to do that. Let's say you are talking about something that is still difficult for you or that you feel not capable of or that hasn't yet happened for you. For example I don't have money, When you say I don't have money, you're saying it in the present tense. Now, we're not gonna deny, and we're not gonna lie, but we can say something like, I haven't yet made the amount of money that I really want. Or, I am in a place where I am working towards making more money, or I'm opening myself to receiving more money than what I've had in the past. You can play with it. You can find what feels authentic to you, what doesn't feel like cheesy or farfetched, what's something that you can actually believe? Let me do another example. Like I don't know how to cook. Instead, you could say, I haven't been much of a cook up until now, but I'm open to learning. Okay? The other thing I wanna say about mind is affirmations. For an affirmation. What we're gonna do is we're gonna counter a limiting belief that currently exists. so for example, let's say I feel that nobody at work likes me. Okay? So I say nobody at work likes me. Nobody at work likes me. You complain to your friend. Nobody at work likes me. You're thinking about work and you say in your head, nobody at work likes me. You keep affirming something, a reality that isn't good for you. So instead you can find what's a phrase that you believe that can counter that. Maybe the phrase, everybody at work likes me is, doesn't feel realistic to you. So you can say something like, I am open to making new, more friendly connections at work. Or, there's an opportunity for me to have better relationships at work. Something that, you'll find it, but some kind of a middle ground that's still positive, that will get you to where you wanna be, where eventually you can say that you're really, relationships are better for real life. Okay, next category. Emotions. The main thing I'm gonna say about emotion is the following. Think about a three layered cake. Emotion is in the middle, mind is at the top, and body is at the bottom. So if you wanna use the body, you could say the three Dan Tiens, you could say mind is around the head centers. Emotion is going to be around the heart center, and body is gonna be around the belly area. Okay? Just to keep it simple, when we have emotion, the most typical reaction when people haven't had a really high level of healing training. The typical way that our culture tells people to deal with their emotions is to go up into their head and to think about it and to try to analyze it. to try to find a solution for it Something mental. What we are going to do to let emotion metabolize and pass through quickly, and effectively is to do the opposite. We're going to find where we are stuck in analysis and where we are stuck in defining and creating a whole narrative. We're gonna stop that and we are gonna go in the opposite direction. We're gonna go to the body. Going to the body means that we are going to look for sensation, we're gonna look for feeling sense physically, because our emotion is living in our energy body and living in our physical body through the sensations that we have. It might feel like tightness, it might feel like trembling. It might feel like a swirling feeling. It might feel like a sinking feeling. It might feel heavy, et cetera. So we start finding the texture of that. The color of that, the location of that, maybe it has a sound, et cetera. And we are going to practice. It takes practice. We're gonna practice finding that, bringing our awareness to it, bringing our breath to it, and bringing care and patience and presence naturally simply by bringing our loving attention to it, it will move and high likelihood it will feel more painful first before it feels better. And one of the reasons for that is because we were dissociated away from paying attention to it when we were in our head. So we weren't actually feeling it as much. Now we are paying attention to it so we can actually realize that it hurts. It's not that the pain is coming out of nowhere, it's that we're actually noticing what was there already. But by noticing it, we're creating an alchemy between our awareness and our experience where that movement can actually happen and we can be free from whatever was currently stuck within us. So I'm gonna pause here. This is going to be the end of part one, and next week we are going to do relationship, the energy body, the personal energy field, energetic health and we are also going to do the level of spirituality, thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Who Could Benefit? Is it a family member? A friend, a client, a colleague who would be inspired, reminded of what matters to them by being in our energy that we've shared here today. So please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For other offerings that I provide, you can go to the ground of love.com I also provide one-on-one healing sessions and I will also be offering a group membership. All of that is on the website, the ground of love.com. Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.