We’re Overusing Healing Modalities

I've overused healing modalities on my journey, and I am not alone. For personal healing and transformation, more isn't necessarily better.

When I first got started on my healing journey, I absolutely overused healing modalities – after all, there were a lot of things I believed needed to be addressed. And I wanted them addressed yesterday. I put a lot of pressure on myself to move quickly, because I wanted to create a miracle. I had this sense that it was possible, that I could spontaneously heal, and I needed to make it my reality.

I went to weekly yoga therapy sessions with a teacher who was gentle and kind, and who began to unlock the art of manifestation for me. I discovered rapid transformational therapy (RTT) and healed the fibromyalgia. Around the same time, I learned about emotion code and had my heart wall removed.

I doubled down on healing modalities. When an emotion code session uncovered an early childhood trauma, there was a heaviness that overtook me. I worked with my own unconscious to try to uncover it, and thought I had an answer. The pain of the realization was unbearable, emotionally, and physically.

I asked a friend, who has the gift to jump into your body energetically and create healing, to alleviate the pain. It helped, but the knowing lingered in the back of my mind. I set up an RTT session to see, once and for all, the root trauma.

Once it was unlocked, I could easily see how all the experiences I had with my health and the relationships I chose to put myself in were a result of this one moment. I hired my therapist and piled on emotion code and Reiki sessions, trying desperately to relieve myself of the shock and grief, the anger and blame, and the self-hatred this new knowledge unleashed from inside of me.

My need for speed when it came to my healing was, in essence, detrimental to my healing. My desperation to remove all the painful emotions from my body, to erase the trauma I had lived through, and to make meaning of all my perceived mistakes, was making me sick. 

And I didn’t even realize it was happening. I found myself back to square one, fatigued, brain fog, anxiety, and with a nervous system that was ready to crash. Not only that, but to this day, I can’t tell you which thing was most impactful for my healing process and moving out of that stage of my life.

But if I had to guess, it was probably the moment I decided to just stop.

No more RTT or emotion code sessions, no more asking for a quick fix from an intuitively gifted friend. No more models to continue to relive the past from different angles to change my brain. It was when I finally gave myself the space to rest, to journal for the sake of journaling, to meditate without the need for a message from my guides, that the work worked.

Integration is a necessary part of healing that many of us want to skip over.

I get it – integration can be really uncomfortable, and it often feels a lot like the thing we sought to heal in our sessions or through the self-healing programs we signed up for. Because it feels so similar, we think that we failed at healing and so we keep going.

But when we pick another modality to point at the same problem, and rather than healing it, we’re telling our bodies and our unconscious that it still exists. We’re reactivating those cells and neural pathways every time we do this. Which is probably the reason that we keep repeating these cycles over and over again.

In my time as an energy healer, working with both the subconscious mind and the energy body, I’d find myself frustrated by clients who don’t let the work sink in. They immediately went to their PSYCH-K practitioner to work on the same issue and followed that up with their tapping teacher for the same thing. They would report back to me that they either felt so much better, but that they weren’t sure if it was my session or the other sessions they layered on. Or they would report back to me that they didn’t feel better, and they had done all these other sessions on top of the one they did with me.

At the time, this frustration felt ego driven. I’d be in my head screaming, “why won’t you let our session work for you?!” It wasn’t until recently that I realized that my anger is more around my belief that these clients weren’t allowing the work to integrate, and they needed to. We aren’t taught to sit with the uncomfortable feelings of integration because we’re taught that the discomfort and the symptoms that come with it are bad or wrong. So, we get out all of the tools in our toolbox to get rid of them, and then we often find ourselves at square one again.

When we don’t allow ourselves to move through integration and to be present with what comes up, we are participating in a form of bypassing. We are here to have a human experience, and part of that experience can mean being uncomfortable in our transformation. It isn’t easy to shed old skin, and it can be painful to lose a part of us that we have held for extended periods of time – even if we are eager to be rid of them.

Even in my more recent processes, I have seen myself doing this – giving myself a perceptual shift session, following it up with PSYCH-K, and then a timeline jump to try to open up to my feminine essence. The scary part, in reflecting, is that I did this all in the span of one week. While doing a subconscious-centered workshop. All because I wanted the change to be immediate, and to see it and feel it immediately. Instead, I found myself feeling untethered from reality and disconnected from my body.

I remember hearing Brooke Castillo talk about how you should select a teacher and then only do their teachings, exactly as they teach them, for a year. At the time I thought, “what a brilliant marketing tactic.” Yet after going through my own healing journey, overdoing it with many modalities, and watching my clients do the same thing, it all started to click. You can’t know what is actually working for you when you throw too many things into the mix at once. It becomes overwhelming for your mind and for your body, because you are often creating conflict when the advice or practices from different teachers are not aligned.

This level of noise also cuts you off from the one expert and teacher you should be listening to: you.

It's not to say that pairing different modalities can’t be beneficial

The more I steeped in this idea, the more I started thinking about ideal pairings. Thinking back on my healing journey, there were four core areas that I focused on: body, energy body, mind, and spirit. Looking back at the modalities that paired well together for me, it looked like this:

·      Yoga

·      Reiki

·      RTT

·      Meditation

My suggestion is that we look carefully at the modalities that we are using and pair them accordingly. While all the parts of ourselves are connected, different modalities are specifically targeted at different parts of our being in order to have a cascading effect on all of the other parts of our being.

For example, you could pick one practice to work with your subconscious and pair it with an energy healing practice, like Reiki, to help alleviate integration symptoms. I like breathwork paired with absolutely anything, because it allows you to be present, connect with your breath, and release whatever needs to be released without the conscious mind getting in the way.

I’d then pair those modalities with a physical practice that allows you to get into your body – like yoga, dance, tai-chi, walking, cycling, etc. – so that you can support the body and release the trapped emotions and energies from your tissues.

And finally, pair all of that with a reflective practice, like journaling, meditation, and/or talk therapy so that you are continuing to support your nervous system and maintaining your presence as you integrate the deeper healing work.

It may not be that you choose one healing modality for an entire year, but maybe it is picking one set of tools for a month or three months – whatever intuitively feels right for you – before trying a different modality.

See how your healing unfolds before you decide that you didn’t heal yourself. Without giving yourself the space to be present with the modality you chose and the unfolding after, you are missing the magic of your own healing, feeding into a vicious cycle of never being healed, and over-taxing your nervous system.

Change happens quickly, and it happens over time. What’s more, one person’s journey and the tools they used to heal the same issue may not be the right journey or formula for you. The most important practice you can lean into is presence. It is in our presence that we find the greatest peace, and ultimately, can bear witness to our own healing.

Laura Lea is a perception shifter and intuitive for spiritual explorers, the hostess of The Perceptionist Podcast, and a quad right 4/6 Manifestor in Human Design. Tap here to get started with your perceptual shift.