Over 15 years ago, I started my nutrition therapy business to assist clients in improving health with “better nutrition through better nutrition education“. As any business owner knows, your business can morph and change. It can evolve into something you didn’t set out to do originally. When it becomes more than nutrition therapy, sometimes even you, the business owner has a hard time merging the aspects of seemingly separate entities.
I wrote an article for Dr Veronica Anderson on LinkedIn several months ago about Merging Nutritional Therapy with Energy Work to highlight some of the struggles I was encountering embracing that I was more than a nutrition therapy coach. I started with nutrition, then stumbled upon Nutrition Response Testing which embraced energy systems of the body to help identify imbalances in the body.
Then I really stumbled upon something amazing although at the time, it wasn’t quite as apparent when I was part of the initial students in training of a new healing modality, The Path To Heal™. This was (and still is) energy work. Through the training, I started to understand how we have perceived emotional insults, sometimes referred to as traumas, and those insults get buried into our energy field. As we continue to ignore them and deny aspects of ourselves or aspects we need to heal, these emotional insults create imbalances in our body. Create enough of an imbalance, and we start to create symptoms of ill-health. Often, the symptoms are just a sign of imbalance and an opportunity to heal a past emotional wound.
This is not a new idea. I wrote about this before when I wrote about ACE’s – Adverse Childhood Experiences which can be causing your current pain. The Kaiser Permanente study appeared in 1997 and refers to it here as toxic stress. This study showed that the stress of the emotional “trauma” often exhibits as a health condition later in life. They worked on 10 areas which resulted in cardiovascular disease, obesity, addictions and certain auto-immune issues.
So it was a natural thing for me to want to incorporate something to help heal that emotional insult and trauma! I wanted people to heal their whole body! Nutrition is a tool, but the energy work is the missing link.
Wow, for years, I wanted to work with athletes and then with everyone else with the energy work. It took me several years to overcome my own fears of being misunderstood, or viewed at crazy by athletes. But I now realize, these emotional issues if left unhealed, create all sorts of negative self-talk, self loathing and conditioned self love – all of which create patterns of additions to more sports, longer rides, more runs and more of anything that will help you escape from the stresses of life. But this running away although is a way of coping, is also a means to creating imbalance in the whole body.
I did it for years before I got sick with adrenal exhaustion 20+ years ago. I know what that looks like, feels like and how to ignore the symptoms and keep chasing the dream of success.
As athletes, we can tune out pain. We are really good at that. But this emotional pain, once resolved sets us free.
Free to be ourselves on all levels of our being. Free to fuel ourselves the way our body wants us to nourish it.
Free to live life in harmony rather than a constant push-pull of what is right, what diet should I be on or what if I put on 10 pounds.
What I do now is so much more than nutrition therapy.
What I was able to do with my own emotional healing was to be able to embrace that everyone, athletes or not, need emotional healing as well as the nutrition therapy. It was no longer a separate thing but a merged combination of magical healing. Yes, 80% is nutrition therapy, but without that other 20% for the emotional, mental and spiritual healing, it is not complete. But until I embraced it, then I was still thinking separate vs. merged modalities.
What I do is transform athletes to love the skin (and life) they are in by harmonizing body, mind, spirit and sport. Then they enjoy life and their whole body at such a different level and never have to punish themselves ever again for what they ate, how they feel or how they move. They can just love who they are – all aspects. I just help them get there on a much quicker path.
As one client said “Joanna is the only one who can help me re-invent myself‘.
But I am not re-inventing them – I am helping reconnect to their authentic self. And when you do that, the body returns to balance as does the nutrition, the emotions and the sleep.
Once I was fully able to embrace the totality of what I do, I realize that what I do IS more than just nutrition therapy.
It is true whole body health. Nutrition for body, mind, spirit and sport.
To find out more about Joanna, go to Nutrition-In-Motion.net or you can reach her at info@nutrition-in-motion.net
