The Rebellious Healer

#34 Is the Goal to be Symptom Free?

• Season 5 • Episode 34

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Are you in a pursuit to be symptom free? I mean I get it, your chronic health symptoms are uncomfortable and are often inconvenient. And lets be real, We are programmed to believe that being symptom-free is the ultimate marker of health. 

But what if I told you that the goal isn’t to be free of all symptoms and never get them, but to learn from them? To use them as signals that guide us toward deeper understanding and healing. 

Today, we’re going to unpack this idea and explore how shifting your perspective around “getting rid” of symptoms and not wanting to have them, can make your healing experience much easier. 

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SPEAKER_00

Are you in a pursuit to be symptom free? I mean, I get it. Your chronic health symptoms are uncomfortable and are often inconvenient. And let's be real, we are programmed to believe that being symptom free is the ultimate marker of health. But what if I told you that the goal isn't to be free of all symptoms and never get them, but to learn from them, to use them as signals that guide us toward deeper understanding and healing? Today, we're going to unpack this idea and explore how shifting your perspective around getting rid of symptoms and not wanting to have them can make your healing experience so much easier. Welcome to the Rebellious Healer, where we ditch the fear, decode the symptoms, and take healing into our own hands. I'm Jenny Peterson, a former holistic practitioner, turn symptom-free mind-body rebel. I help women break free from protocols and step into trust, confidence, and full body healing. If you're done with rules, restrictions, and outsourcing your power, you're in the right place. All right, so many of us have been conditioned to believe that symptoms are a sign of failure in your body or that they represent something that needs to be fixed or suppressed. You get a cold and your health nut neighbor says, it must be your low immune system, you better take some vitamin C. But what if we shifted our perspective? What if instead of seeing symptoms as enemies and like our body has failed, we viewed them as messengers? Experiencing symptoms does not mean you failed in any way. They are not something you should be ashamed of. They're simply signals from your body indicating that it's responding to something significant in your life. Shame and embarrassment were emotions I felt when I was experiencing my chronic health symptoms. As a holistic practitioner, I didn't want people to know that I was quote unquote sick. How could I be this way when I eat so healthy and teach the ins and outs of health? This perception didn't help my healing. Instead, it just contributed to additional stress. When you experience symptoms, it actually means that you have successfully navigated through a conflict or that you're encountering what is a subconscious track, a situation that reminds your body of a previous unresolved issue. By understanding this, you can start to see your symptoms as part of a natural and healthy process rather than as something to be feared or suppressed. When you have symptoms, your body is indicating that it's in the healing process. This is confusing for a lot of us that have been programmed to believe that symptoms mean that there is something wrong. We have not been taught how our body is biologically designed or what healing actually looks like. We accept that a cut healing is painful, swollen, and oozing. But when that happens in our digestive tract, we immediately want to stop it. I want you to think of yourself as a detective, piecing together the clues that your body is giving you. Your symptoms are like breadcrumbs, leading you to a greater understanding of how your experiences, emotions, and thoughts are interconnected. One of the most powerful things you can do for your health is study your life. Pay attention to your patterns, your experiences, and the triggers that seem to reoccur. These are the moments that remind your body of the original conflicts that triggered your symptoms in the first place. By recognizing these patterns, you can start to break free from them and move toward true healing. Awareness is a major player in your healing. You have to become aware of how you perceive and respond to life. When your symptoms appear, they will be directly related to these. When you deeply understand how your body works and how your tissues adapt to certain experiences, you'll find that you become more calm and confident in your own health. You'll no longer feel like a victim of your symptoms, but rather an active participant in your own healing process. This is an incredible, empowering shift, one that can transform your relationship with your body and your health. Instead of reacting with fear or frustration, you'll approach these moments with curiosity and a sense of purpose. This is what it means to make the unconscious conscious. And this journey is about becoming more awake, more aware, and more adaptable. It's about growing into a version of yourself that is resilient, resourceful, and responsive to life's challenges. When you embrace this approach, you'll find that your symptoms no longer feel like obstacles, but rather opportunities for growth and self-discovery. Now it's important to address a common misconception. Many people believe that their symptoms are caused by external factors, germs, food, genetics, toxins, etc. While these factors can certainly influence our health, they are not the full story. By focusing solely on external causes, we miss out on the opportunity to explore the internal causes, the thoughts, perceptions, and experiences that play a crucial role in our health. It's easy to blame something outside ourselves when we're feeling unwell, but it's far more challenging and rewarding to look within. By observing the internal causes of your symptoms, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and take control of our own healing journey. This is where the real work begins and where the potential for true transformation, not just in your health, but your entire life, lies. Now, if I was to ask you, what are your healing goals? What do you want to achieve? And your answer is that you want all your symptoms to go away and you never want to see them again, this mindset will bring a lot of force and a lot of focus on your symptoms rather than focusing on your personal growth. Because it's your personal growth, which includes letting go of all the old subconscious patterns that are not working for you, that is what really makes your symptoms go away. And let's be real, if focusing on your symptoms was the solution, you wouldn't have them anymore, right? Because you've done a dang good job having them consume your mind and your life. You have focused on them a lot. So what if we shifted that focus and instead focused on stepping into a new version of you? The version that responds to life in healthier ways, no longer reacts with fear, and loves yourself unconditionally. Do you know what that would do for your body? It would send a signal to it that its commander-in-chief is a rock star, that he or she is adaptable to your primal survival brain, it would feel safe. And when you are adaptable and send messages of safety to your body, your body no longer needs to adapt for you. That's what symptoms are. They are adaptations to your experiences that you were unable to process. And because your mind was unable to process the situation, your body has done it for you for survival. So I encourage you to shift your healing goal from getting rid of symptoms to becoming a new version of you. The focus will then be on you taking action to change you, which is the biggest factor in your healing. With this simple shift, you will notice how you no longer feel pressured to get rid of your symptoms. Instead, there will be excitement and motivation to discover the parts of you that are blocking your healing. I describe it like the excitement that I used to get when I would get a new supplement thinking it's gonna be the one to change everything. I would rip the top off and I couldn't wait to take it, right? It's that kind of excitement that I now feel when I go internally as a detective to identify what is connected to a symptom. That is what I hope for you to get excited about too. So each day, I encourage you to set an intention, to be curious and learn something new about yourself. Pay attention to your thoughts, your triggers, and responses to situations. Now, here is where I don't want you to go from one extreme and just make it to be the same way with this type of work. So, what typically happens is a person will be very obsessed about focusing on their symptoms, and then they go to being very obsessed about all of their thoughts and actions, and it's consuming them just observing themselves. That is not what I'm asking you to do here. This is about just little bites here and there. Be an observer of you. Don't become obsessed of observing yourself to the point where it's so consuming you just the same way that it was consuming you to try and find the answers to fix all your symptoms. That's not what we're doing here. And that's also not healthy for you either. That is very stressful. We just need to do this in little bites. So you want to pay attention to your thoughts and triggers and responses to situations the best you can. And in moderation, it does don't go to extreme where you're noting everything that you do. Just every, you know, once in a while or when something really triggers you, that's a moment to really sit back and observe. I love at the end of the day, you know, to observe your day and observe how you responded. And the things that are the big things, those things will stand out at the end of the day. That is a good practice to put into play, is doing it at the end of the day rather than thinking all day long you have to make this a full-time job of observing you. We don't want to do that. So you want to start discovering yourself and some of these patterns through the ways in which you are responding to situations. So, what can you discover about yourself that you haven't seen before? When you open your eyes to a lot of the things that are just automatically happening that you're not seeing now, you'll be surprised at how much you're noticing. Don't put pressure on yourself, like I said, to resolve or fix anything. We're not doing that right now. We're just noticing. And remember, this is just this is a project. It's it's not a problem that we need to solve immediately. It's a project. This is a journey of discovery, not a race to the to the finish line. You have to build this awareness before you can start taking action. And a curious attitude creates the space for those insights to land and transform your understanding. The curiosity is what we need to step into. It's being curious. It's, oh, that's interesting. Oh, wow. I never noticed myself doing that before. It's this little stuff, you know, that you don't want to go and be, oh, that's interesting. I need to fix it. That's that's not what we're doing here. That's the same type of mentality that we go from, oh, that's this is the problem. I need to go find a supplement. I need to fix this now. That's not what we're doing with this because that's not healthy. We have to look and be an observation and in that curiosity and be okay with staying in that for some time before we go in and make the connections to where that's all coming from. So here's me being frank, honest, and to the point. Stop being obsessed about getting rid of your symptoms. It's simply the wrong focus. The prevention and resolution of symptoms, disease, or illness, whatever you want to call it, is within you, not a pill or special diet. Because we all know if it was, you still wouldn't be experiencing your symptoms. The same goes for prevention. We don't need to take all this stuff to prevent having cancer, disease, et cetera. Prevention isn't in these places. It's in your mind. And the great thing about this work is that when you step into the 2.0 version of you, you will also have less symptoms in the future. By becoming a person that responds in healthier ways, you naturally prevent having symptoms. This is why when students leave our program, they are going to prevent having symptoms in the future by what by applying what they have learned. They have gotten rid of what they currently have, but they also know that if they are to experience symptoms in the future, they know what to do with it. And that's why if we do get symptoms in the future, because we are human, we understand what they mean. It's not the end of the world. It's an opportunity. There's no shame or thinking that your body or you have failed. Shifting your focus from trying to fix or get rid of your symptoms to focusing on your personal growth will make your healing journey less stressful and honestly more exciting. When I did this for myself, it was a pivotal part of my healing. It's the same for our students. We see such a change in their growth when they make this shift in their mind from focusing on their symptoms to focusing on stepping into that 2.0 version of themselves. So you may be thinking, what do I need to do to create these changes in me to become this version of, to become this 2.0 version of me? Well, I already mentioned starting with awareness, and really that is the first step. Be the observer of you. Pause when you respond to situations. Notice what your automatic responses are and see if it's a response that would be interpreted as feeling safe. Do you respond with fear, self-judgment, holding it in and not saying something? These kinds of patterns are going to feel like a threat to your body. They don't feel safe. Those are the kinds of patterns you are looking for. It's all about safety. Your brain and body only care about am I safe at this time or am I not safe at this time? What is your perception of your experiences that you are having on a day-to-day basis? Is it, am I safe or am I unsafe? And that's going to help determine what patterns you need to work on. From there, it's about unwiring those old patterns and where they came from to rewiring new ones. That is going to look different for everybody. That is what requires specific targeted work to you. This is what we specialize in in MBR. We are subconscious detectives putting it all together for you and giving you the exact steps you need to take to unravel all of this and step into your 2.0 self. Transformational work doesn't come with the standard protocol. You can get started doing this work now. I have given you two ways you can do that today. One is by shifting your focus from fixing or getting rid of symptoms to personal growth and curiosity. Just by doing this alone, your body and mind will feel so much more relaxed. There is less force. You're not going to get up every day and start Googling what to do for your symptoms. You shift from being fearful to curious, which is number two. Start getting curious. Notice how you respond to situations in your life. Is how you're responding sending a message of safety or unsafety to your body. Does it feel safe or unsafe? Is all your body and mind care about. Think about this from a survival perspective. Feeling weak, not good enough, fearful, attacked, powerless, etc., are all going to jeopardize survival according to your primal brain. We always need to view this from a biological perspective. Survival is priority to the mind and body. While this may feel like a lot of work to your brain, who loves to stay in old patterns to be an observance of you, don't be tempted to just replace all your thinking or responses with positive thinking. Your healing isn't going to happen by talking positive to yourself all day. While positive thinking is helpful in some ways, it's not even close to the deep level work that is required to make your body feel safe and allow it to complete the healing process. Sorry, but quick fixes, as you know, don't work for anything. You gotta do the work. You have unconsciously wired your brain to operate this way. Rewiring is going to require much more of a conscious effort, but it's so worth it. Thank you for joining me today. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to share it with someone who might benefit from this perspective. And as always, remember to keep healing simple and to stay out of fear.