130: Healing Psoriasis, Eczema, Candida, Acid Reflux, Severe Headaches, Joint Pain, Low Blood Pressure, Adrenal Fatigue & Hypo Thyroid with Sarah Dawkins

TRANSCRIPT 

00:00:00 Chazmith: Hi. Welcome to Our Power Is Within Podcast. I am your host, Chazmith, and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and realize that you are the healer that you've been looking for all along. We are capable of healing in mind, in body, and in soul. If you follow me on Instagram, then you might know already that I am collecting my listeners' wins. These wins can be big or small because all wins matter. But I really want to create a collection of wins directly from each of you that you have had recently on your journeys so that I can share them with the world and help inspire more people who maybe aren't quite there yet and need that extra inspiration. Please consider sharing one of your wins. The ways that you can do this is you can email me, DM me, leave a voice memo on my website. There are lots of options to connect, but all I ask is that you help me with this project by sending me one win today. Our guest is Sarah D. It was so fun to connect with. Sarah and hear her story because there are so many layers to it.

00:01:18 Chazmith: She takes us through a timeline where she peels back layer by layer, discovering the next aspect of healing for her. And through it all, she also discovers that healing is so multifaceted and it took her addressing every aspect of her life, from her thoughts and beliefs, to her nutrition input, to her exercise output, and even healing on a quantum level. If you're wondering what all that means, you're going to find out in today's episode. It is jam packed with juiciness and I hope you enjoy.

00:01:48 Chazmith: Sarah, thank you so much for being here with me today.

00:01:51 Sarah: Oh, it's wonderful. Thank you for the invitation, Chazmith.

00:01:54 Chazmith: Indeed. So I think what we're going to do is we're going to dig right in and we're going to start out with you sharing a little bit about your story. So to kind of guide that, I would love if you would just maybe start out by talking to us about what you're up to now and then we can backtrack to what led you to that and through your own personal experience.

00:02:18 Sarah: Okay, Thank you. So what I'm up to now, I work as a Holistic Health Coach. I help people to find and heal the root cause of their symptoms. I'm not a lover of identifying with a diagnosis, so I tend to talk about symptoms and why the body's manifested those symptoms.

00:02:37 Sarah: So I have conversations with clients and sometimes I need to get a little bit blunt just to challenge them a little bit and take them out of the comfort zone so they can then identify further things they might not have identified. But ultimately that helps them to find the root cause and heal it much quicker rather than just dragging it out as a talk therapy session. So I work with clients all over the world because of the Internet, and I work with people locally here in Spain, face to face, or I go to their home, or they come to my home, depending on proximity. So that's where I'm at with work. And on the back of that, I wrote a book and a course as well.

00:03:24 Chazmith: Yeah. You have a book called Heal Yourself that's available on Amazon, correct?

00:03:27 Sarah: It is, yes. And I believe the English version is available in Barnes and Noble in America.

00:03:33 Chazmith: Awesome! That's good to know. What is the premise of that book?

00:03:35: Sarah: So that book came about because of my own natural self healing, and the crux of it was I ended up in a depression, which spiraled down to a suicidal depression. The doctor wanted to give me antidepressants. Now, I'd been on antidepressants after the birth of my son.

00:03:53 Sarah: For a postnatal depression, they didn't really do a lot for me other than sort of numbed me. And I felt quite zombie like. So I walked out of his office saying, thank you very much, but it's not for me. I have no idea what I'm going to do because I wasn't very deep into Natural Holistic Healing at that time. And I walked out, don't know what I'm going to do, but I know one way or another, I will heal it.

00:04:16 Sarah: And it was through my own healing and literally stumbling upon things and working it out myself that as I started to feel better, I thought, I need to help people to see that they don't have to take pharmaceuticals, they can start doing things for themselves. And that's how my book started out. But then the nagging self doubt came about and that little voice on my shoulder went, who do you think you are? You're not an author. Nobody wants to hear what you've got to say.

00:04:45 Sarah: And my book went to bed on my laptop for five years, and it was only one day I woke up and thought, suddenly I've got to get more people on board. I've got to get my book out to a wider audience and see who's healed what and how they've healed and get them to explain what they did as well on their own journey and give them their own chapter to explain that. And that's how my book was born. Starting with my own journey, but then growing a wider audience through reaching out on social media platforms and giving other people a voice to share their own stories.

00:05:19 Chazmith: That's awesome. How many stories are in the book?

00:05:22: Sarah: Myself and 74 others.

00:05:24 Chazmith: Oh, 74.

00:05:26 Sarah: I know I'll be pleased if I can get 50. So when I got 74, it's like, just blew my mind.

00:05:33 Chazmith: Yeah, that's amazing. Really awesome. I have to look that up for sure. And I'll leave a link in the show notes for anybody who's interested because we all love testimonials for sure.

00:05:41 Sarah: Absolutely. And thank you.

00:05:43 Chazmith: Now, you said that it kind of was bird through your own healing journey, and you did mention a depression that became a suicidal depression, but I'm also aware that you had some list of physical conditions also that you've healed from.

00:05:58 Sarah: Yes, I started out with psoriasis, eczema and acid reflux, and then I started with joint pains, back, hip and knee. Then it went to a severe debilitating headache that literally left me on the sofa all day long, unable to do anything, two frozen shoulders, a candida infection, an underactive thyroid. And then finally, with all the stress of everything, I burned out my adrenal glands and dropped my blood pressure down dangerously low, down to 80 over 40, and just craved salt all the time. I couldn't eat enough salt. So over a period of time, I've totally healed all of those as well.

00:06:38 Chazmith: That's amazing. I'm hoping that as we continue this conversation, we'll unpack some of the ways that you approached healing and what the catalyst was to really initiate true healing for yourself. But I'd like to ask a question first. I hear a lot about this term Natural Healing, and I was wondering if you could give the audience an expanded definition or an explanation of what Natural Healing is.

00:07:07 Sarah: So it's what our body does normally every day. It's naturally healing itself because that's what it's designed to do to support us in our life.

00:07:17 Sarah: So, for example, if you cut yourself or bruise yourself, you don't think, oh, what pills can I take? How am I going to treat this? I need to go and see a doctor. You just think, okay, so I'll just clean it or watch it, and over a period of a short time, they will heal. And that's what Natural Self-healing is. It's the body doing what it's designed to do. So I help clients to tap into I call it Body Wisdom because our body knows what to do, we just have to support it. And sadly, the Western lifestyle and food source now is so polluted that's actually feeding disease processes. So it's about stepping outside of, I need a medicine, I need to go to a doctor to think, what can I do to support my body to heal itself, like you would if you quit yourself or bruised yourself.

00:08:12 Chazmith: That makes so much sense. What were some of the really big components for you on your journey?

00:08:19 Sarah: So initially it was destressed because the first major thing that I self-healed was psoriasis. And I lived down on the south coast of England at the time, and I had these big red, ugly patches on my legs. And after using steroid cream for ages, knowing that it would thin my skin and not really healing it, it would reduce the symptoms, then it would come back. And then it would reduce, then it come back.

00:08:45 Sarah: So one day I thought, you know, I'm just going to wear shorts get these big red ugly patches out in the sun, do lots of walking, and in doing the walking, it helped reduce stress. So I had the sunlight, the sea air and the walking, the exercise, which was also a stress reliever. And by the end of that summer, that psoriasis on my legs had totally disappeared. Not a single mark to show where it had been. And that was quite a while ago, but at the time I just kind of dismissed it great, it's gone.

00:09:15 Sarah: I didn't realize how profound that healing was in my own journey because I'd been raised in the medical model. My mum was a nurse. I truly believe that when you're sick you have to go to the doctors. So that, as I say, was my first healing. The eczema and acid reflux, they're both stress related problems, but they're also linked to dairy and gluten because dairy and gluten have been found to actually cause inflammation within the body. And the root cause of disease and pain is inflammation. Outside of obviously having an accident and a trauma, inflammation causes pain and it also causes disease. So if we can help our body to heal that inflammation and take on board foods that don't cause inflammation, we're really helping it and supporting our immune system. So I actually stopped eating gluten and dairy. For me, the dairy was the harder part because I loved milk, loved cheese, love yogurt, had to give all of that up.

00:10:23 Sarah: But over a period of maybe a month or six weeks, the acid reflux had totally gone away, as had the Eczema totally healed, which that was more pivotal in my healing. Then I realized then that actually I am able to support my body because I said the psoriasis, I hadn't made that link. I just thought, well great, that's gone. Because I was a lot younger as well at the time. So that was my real first pivotal understanding of how the body can heal itself.

00:10:52 Chazmith: Now, are you still in a place where you never eat gluten or dairy? Or are you able now, through many layers of healing, to have built up the resilience in your body, to be able to tolerate stuff like that, Occasionally? 

00:11:06 Sarah: Well, you know, I'm in a human form and just occasionally there's a Chocolate Brownie that shouts out, "Sarah, eat me, eat me." And I'll succumb to it. But it's not very often. I do tend to stay right away from gluten and dairy. Maybe, I don't know, three or four times a year I might have something with either or both in it, but I know it causes me. I get joint pains in my fingers, my fingers hurt and my knees hurt when I eat gluten and dairy, I don't have the eczema , I don't have the acid reflux anymore, although sometimes I do get an acidic stomach, but I don't get the reflux.

00:11:46 Sarah: So I know that if I've eaten the foods that I know that my body doesn't tolerate, my body will let me know with pain.

00:11:54 Chazmith: That makes sense. Okay, so what else? Keep telling me more because I know you healed other things too.

00:12:01 Sarah: Yeah.

00:12:02 Chazmith: So as you continue down this path, what else did you discover?

00:12:05 Sarah: So I had candida infection for two years, and at that time, I'd gone back to the doctor because I still wasn't fully on board with the Natural Healing. And I was fed up of just having this awful sensation, this burning, this need to go to the toilet all the time, not able to have intimate relationship with my husband. And the doctor kept giving me these Anti-candida tablets, and they're single dose mega doses, and I kept taking them every three days, and then I take the three-day course and a week course, and they're supposed to be one off tablets, and it didn't heal.

00:12:39 Sarah: And two years down the line, I said, no, enough. I've got to do something. I've healed eczema and psoriasis and acid reflux. It's got to be something I could do. And I cut out sugar at that time because I had a really sweet tooth and stopped eating any sort of bread, no gluten free bread, no nothing, and increased the fruits and vegetables in my diet, and that helped a lot, but it took time.

00:13:06 Sarah: If you've had something for quite a while, you can't just heal it overnight. You need to support your body to detoxify and to reduce the inflammation that's built up, because I say it's the inflammation that causes the problems. And after that, I went on to have hip, back and knee pain. So I'd rather go to my doctor. I searched out a chiropractor, and they were all separate periods of time.

00:13:33 Sarah: And over those times, he did manipulation, he did some acupuncture, he did some heat treatment, some infrared treatment, and I didn't take a single painkiller whilst I had those pains at different times. And over a period of a couple of months, they'd all gone. I was totally pain free again. And then I think after that, I went on to develop really severe headache. I've never had migraine, and I'm not a headache person. So I woke up one day and I could literally barely get out of bed. I managed to crawl to the sofa. My husband set me up with some drinks and some food, and he went out to work, and my kids went to school, and I stayed on the sofa the whole day. I felt absolutely shocking with the pain, but I didn't want to take any painkillers. And about a week down the line, my family was so concerned, I'm just like, oh, let me get through this next minute. Let me get through this next minute. Don't talk to me. Don't put the lights on. And in the end, I was persuaded to go to the doctor. And the doctor said, "It's stress. It's a stress headache." I said, "I've got no stress and it's not across my forehead, it's across the top of my head." So he said, "I'm going to give you some really strong painkillers." I think they were non steroidal anti-inflammatories. And he said, "You can only stay on them for a maximum six months because they will literally kill your kidneys." And I'm like, "Wow, what kind of a drug is this?" Anyway, I took them for a couple of days because I was in so much pain and I literally couldn't do anything and they barely touched the pain. And I thought, at the end of the day, I'd much rather have that little bit extra pain. I'm already debilitated by it, so what's a bit more but save my kidneys. So that's what I did.

00:15:12 Sarah: I stopped taking the tablets and I managed to ring my chiropractor and tell him the pain that was having over the top of my head and asked him if he could do anything because I've only ever done back work with him, not headaches. And he had literally just written a research article saying that people who'd suffered Whiplash get this same headache that I got right across the top of my head. So he asked, "Have you ever had Whiplash?" I said, "Well, yes, about 20 years ago."  And he said, "Great, can you get to my office?"

00:15:42 Sarah: I struggled into his office and I had two treatments a week for kind of three, four weeks, and the headache totally disappeared. And I didn't take a single painkiller, I just had the treatment and it got rid of the headache. So it wasn't stress related at all, it was coming from a previous injury. And then I ended up with a frozen shoulder one year and the other frozen shoulder the following year. So I went back to my chiropractor, who treated me with chiropractic manipulation and acupuncture.

00:16:09 Sarah: And again, I didn't take a single painkiller. And I know some people have ended up in hospital with frozen shoulders and they go through an operation they put to sleep, and the surgeon literally just moves their arm through a range of motion, breaking all the connections that have been made to hold the shoulder in that position. So I didn't need any of that, just some chiropractic manipulation. But it was after that that I then spiraled down into a deep dark depression. And it was so deep, I ended up feeling suicidal.

00:16:40 Sarah: And I did go back to doctors, as I said earlier, and he wanted to give me antidepressants, didn't want to do them, didn't know what I was going to do. But one of my really good friends started taking me to the gym every Wednesday afternoon and we did two back-to-back classes and at the same time we had dogs. So I was out every day walking the dogs. And I think it must have been a combination between the two. I suddenly one day woke up and realized there was a world outside of me, because I've been so inside myself that I hadn't really noticed what was going on outside.

00:17:13 Sarah: My friend would come pick me up, I would do the class, and I would come home. And I wasn't really consciously aware of what I was doing. It was just all done on autopilot. So one day I said I was walking the dogs and suddenly realized there's bloods on the trees, the flowers on the floor, the skies turned blue, and it was spring, and it was such a strong feeling. It really stays with me because it's like I've suddenly realized I'm feeling better.

00:17:38 Sarah: I'm not crying every day. I don't feel suicidal. Looking back now, I realized I was being mindful, but at the time I had no idea what I was doing. So I started practicing more mindfulness, or at the time I started just looking at what was around me and becoming conscious of where I was and what I was doing. And then I started practicing gratitude. I'm so thankful that I didn't take my life because really, I didn't really want to kill myself. I just wanted the situation and the pain just to stop. So I started practicing gratitude. I'm seeing all these beautiful things. I didn't take my life. My family loves me. And then I started thinking, well, what else can I do? Oh, I tried meditating, sat cross legged on my sofa, but that little voice on my shoulders like, who do you think you are? What do you think you're doing? I needed to shut that up, and I could do that with a guided meditation on YouTube.

00:18:31 Sarah: So I found initially just five minutes, somebody's voice that I liked, just to find calm, to find peace in myself. And then as I started to find a bit more peace, I started daring to look into the future. Can I dare to think what's my life going to be like in a month or in six months or in a year? And my husband had said, "Why don't you set the business up?" So I actually left nursing and went into become an entrepreneur.

00:18:58 Sarah: So I've meditated on winning awards. I don't just want to be any entrepreneur, I want to be an award winning, successful entrepreneur. And I'd actually meditated on it. And I won an award at the university where I was at locally. And they put me forward to a national UK freelancers award competition, which I then entered and won second place at that.

00:19:20 Sarah: So I really stepped out of the depression and the low mood. And when I looked back, I was healing it because I started eating good food. I was doing the exercise, I was doing mental health work with the gratitude and the mindfulness and the meditation. And I thought I'd healed just with those three pillars, the physical, the mental, and the spiritual, because I'd connected back to myself to my own inner wisdom. But it wasn't until I decided to step outside of that business and start helping other people.

00:19:54 Sarah: So I realized I needed to be a coach to do that that I found that I hadn't actually even considered that I needed to heal on an emotional level. I didn't know that. I didn't know. So while I was doing my coach training, the lady was a very Spiritual Teacher, and she took us all on an internal journey to tap into our Body Wisdom, to find that trauma. Because our body knows, our subconscious mind knows what happened, to play on a screen so that we're not a part of it, so that it doesn't raise all the emotions that we had, so that we can understand what happened.

00:20:31 Sarah: When you start analyzing it and looking at it, and you come to realize that we're all the product of our life's experiences and we view the lives through the filters that we've built up over our eyes, over life's experiences, that we're all a product of what we've been through. So by understanding that, you can see how the people that hurt you in the past must have also been hurt in their past, because we tend to repeat patterns until we become conscious of it. So it's about changing that belief. Like I changed from being a nurse to think I'm needing tablets to understanding how self-healing works. I was also able to let go of that. I'd realize I'd put myself in. I don't like the term victim mentality. It's more of a living in survival mode rather than healing that. So the emotional healing by letting go and forgiving the past was the last piece of my jigsaw. And that's when it all came together then.

00:21:31 Sarah: And that's when my book was totally finished. Then when I realized I needed to put that emotional healing in. And that's when I reached out to other people to join my book. And at the same time, I started writing a course identifying all those steps that I'd done through my own healing journey. Because my book is about lots of people who've healed all sorts of things that doctors said can't be healed.

00:21:53 Sarah: Things like Multiple Sclerosis and ALS, which we call Motor Neuron Disease and Autoimmune and Lyme and Cancer, Allergies and Sensitivities and so many things doctors say you can't heal. You just need medications. So it's about understanding that. Is that belief that I can't heal, that I need medications, is that my belief? Or is that a belief that I've borrowed from my caregivers or significant people in my life when I was a child? Does it still work for me now? And if it doesn't, what can I do to change that? Belief? And beliefs are a huge part of healing because if you believe you can, or you believe you can't, you're right. I think that was Henry Ford that said that.

00:22:42 Sarah: So you need to understand how your belief feeds any health problems, but not just that, the way your life pans out. When you look at your life, what are your beliefs around what's happening? And can you see how your life reflects what's going on in your subconscious mind?

00:23:04 Chazmith: Yeah, that's a really good point, and it makes so much sense because the power of belief is very powerful.

00:23:08 Sarah: Absolutely. And you only have to look at the placebo effect to see that it's been scientifically proven.

00:23:15 Chazmith: Right. And a lot of times we do need to do some deeper work to really get clear about what the deeper beliefs are. Because a lot of times we think on the surface we believe one thing, but when we do some investigating, we quickly can discover that there might be an underlying belief that might be in conflict with what we think we believe.

00:23:36 Sarah: Absolutely. And like you say, it's not always conscious.

We have to really delve deep into the inner work to see what that belief is.

00:23:45 Chazmith: Absolutely. Now, I'm curious, just because we kind of got a nice timeline of your story, where did the burnout of adrenal glands fall into the mix?

00:23:54 Sarah: That came about when I was spiraling down into that deep, dark depression, my thyroid stopped working and became underactive, and I stopped sweating when I went to the gym, I was doing 2 hours of intense workouts. When I'd started, I was sweating. But when I'd finished at the end of that healing, I'd literally stopped sweating and dropped my blood pressure. So I knew I'd healed part of me because I didn't feel so depressed and had the suicidal thoughts. But now I was no longer able to sweat, and my blood pressure was very, very low. And I attribute that to all the stress of the things that were happening around me at the time I was going through that depressive episode, and they healed as I was healing the depression through nourishing my body and detoxifying my body. But also a big thing for the thyroid gland is it's linked to the throat chakra, because your thyroid is obviously in your throat, and if you're not speaking out and saying what you need to say, that can affect your Thyroid Gland. And at the time, I wasn't saying what I needed to say. I was swallowing my words because I didn't want to cause any conflict. And in doing so, I caused the conflict in myself.

00:25:08 Sarah: So by improving my diet and doing the exercise and starting to speak out my mind and detoxifying, I slowly started to heal my Thyroid Gland and was able to sweat again. But my Adrenal Glands took quite a bit more healing, and I just kept with the nourishment, with the exercise, the sleep, the hydration, the speaking out, connecting back to my own Body Wisdom, doing some more meditation, being more mindful. It's the whole everything the bigger picture. And Charlotte Gerson of the Gerson Institute says: "You can't heal two diseases and keep warm. When you heal, your body just heals. Because remember, the root cause of everything is inflammation outside of accidents and trauma. So if you're doing the work to heal that inflammation, because even stress and unhealed trauma causes inflammation. So if you're doing all of that work and supporting your body on a physical and emotional and mental and spiritual level, you will heal. But it will take time. As I say, you can't have something for quite a long time and expect it to heal overnight.

It will take almost as long, if not longer, than you've had it to heal it."

00:26:23 Chazmith: Yeah, speaking of all this, we were talking offline and I was looking over your course and you have 20 sections. And I really love that you point out that reducing the inflammation is not just about the physical stuff, because there are a lot of people who think that. And I was at one point in my life one of those people. I did all the right things on paper, physically. I had the perfect diet, the perfect exercise routine, did all these things, and yet I still got sicker and sicker. That's because at that time I didn't obviously heal some of the deeper emotional components and mental stuff that I was going through. And so, yeah, it's really good that we highlight that. That plays a big role in it's. Everything back to your course, you have 20 sections that kind of all focus on something different.

00:27:14 Chazmith: And I was wondering if we could go through some of however you want to organize it. Whether you want to kind of say, like, what's the most high priority, valuable action step within each section, or just in general, what are some of the biggest, most important elements that people can focus on for their own natural self? Healing.

00:27:36 Sarah: I think belief is a huge component of healing. To understand what your beliefs are, not just around healing, but around life, around nutrition, around rest, around self-care, around self-love. Your beliefs play such a huge part. And that's why I've put the very first module of self-evaluation, because it looks at your beliefs around a whole different set of things in your life. So you can really dig in and that will give you a good grounding of where your beliefs are, and your answers will help you in further modules, so that will give you the grounding. Cleansing your body is a really good way to support your body to help reduce inflammation. And it's not just on nutrition. There's things like pet therapy where being around animals, animals can help relieve some of that negativity in your body and reduce stress and therefore reduce inflammation. Module eleven thoughts, emotions and beliefs build on module one. So that takes you deeper into where your thoughts come from and the emotions that are around them and the beliefs that underpin them. And that helps you to. Start looking at what you can start changing.

00:28:54 Sarah: And in that section as well, I've also highlighted emotional eating because more so for ladies, I think we tend to use food as a crutch and I know I did and I've got a terrible sweet tooth but I can keep that in check by eating a nutritious diet. But I know when I'm feeling emotional the first thing I want to do is reach for the sugar. So I look at why we start reaching out for food, why we use food as a crutch and what it is that we think we're finding that food and how that helps. Not helps too, but it helps alleviate some of the emotional problems. It doesn't really because it's just getting the sugar hit.

00:29:35 Sarah: So it's about understanding how that works in module 16 that builds on the two previous modules because it gets you to look at and really reflect on your life. In all of this, I'll just say I've got 14 coaches that have all donated articles so some of these modules have got my own, the modules that I wrote and then I reached out like I did for my book. So I've got guest articles within them as well. So the lady that's written self-reflections more reflecting on your life to help you understand where you are now to see how much you've moved forward. Whereas the self-reflection I've put into this model is more about the people who have pain or who have an active disease process to look at your underlying beliefs that potentially feed that pain or that disease process and how you can use journaling to change those beliefs around what you're feeling.

00:30:34 Sarah: Usually now I've put death and dying in it and people might say well, what's death and dying got to do with health and healing? There is fear. A lot of people have a fear around death or dying and it goes into the different types of fears, what it is around death and dying that we fear. But the metaphysics associated with that because if you've got a fear of death and dying that will manifest as lung problems or it can manifest as a depression and it's around the fear that you've got of death and dying. So if you can heal that fear your body will heal the symptoms that it's manifesting as a result of that fear. If that makes sense.

00:31:19 Chazmith: It does, yeah, absolutely. I think that's very important.

00:31:23 Sarah: Yeah, I hadn't put that in until fairly recently. That was a new module and I thought after speaking to a lady who is a grief coach that is so important. And then Quantum Healing because we're understanding how quantum physics works more and more and it's about tapping into that quantum healing because we can all tap into that Quantum Healing power but we have to put some trust into it to trust that it will come to us. So it's like putting intention out. We put the intention out to heal. And that intention comes back through the quantum in healing. For me, that most people understand the physical healing, like the nutrition, the exercise, the sleep, the hydration, even potentially breathing exercises to flood your body with oxygen so that it can help the healing process.

00:32:15 Sarah: I mean, I didn't realize, I didn't know that. I didn't know until I did my coaching course. So I think those modules specifically highlight your belief system and will help you to really drill down into that emotional healing, which is often the crux of some of the symptoms that the body can manifest.

00:32:35 Chazmith: Yeah, it sounds very reflective, like very deep reflective work.

0032:40 Sarah: Yes. Looking at where you are now, how you got there, where your beliefs have come from, what the origins of those beliefs are. That's part of the emotional work. And then the section Twelve Goals and Habits is looking at what you do now and how that impacts your future and how you can set goals on healing, but not just healing, but in life in general to help yourself.

00:33:02 Chazmith: Right. Do you personally just think and believe that everybody can heal?

00:33:07 Sarah: We can all heal. Our body heals every day. Like I say, when we get a bruise or a cut, we don't think about it. Our body will just heal, but we have to support our body. The only thing I would say outside of that is like Chromosomal Disorders and Genetic Disorders.

I've not got specialist knowledge within that area. But that said, with the genetics, we might be genetically predisposed to something, but it's our lifestyle, our thoughts, our behaviors that decide whether we express that genetic health problem or not. Just because we've got the gene doesn't mean to say we're going to express it. It's what we do with our lives that will decide whether that gene expresses or not.

00:33:49 Chazmith: Right. Yeah, absolutely. You believe everybody for the most part can heal, but do you think that everybody can do it on their own? Or do you think that some people need support depending on maybe what their trauma history is or how dysregulated their nervous system is or just where they're at in their progression of illness?

00:34:10 Sarah: I think we all need help at some point. For me, my own personal journey, I needed help to understand that I needed to heal on an emotional level and doing my coach training actually did that for me. That really helped me to tap into that need that I had and find it. You can do the physical, the mental and the spiritual healing yourself if you know what you're doing. And there's lots of information on the internet not saying you have to go and have support or pay for a coach. There's so much that you can do on your own. And that's the point of me writing my book. And my course is to help people to help themselves because not everybody can go out and pay for a coach, and not everybody's doctors will support them to do the Emotional Healing. They're more just prescribe a tablet. So it's about understanding what resources there are to help people to help themselves.

00:35:08 Chazmith: Right, Yeah, that makes sense. And so when we talk about self-healing, we're not saying that self-healing is about doing healing alone. It just means that we do have the capacity internally in our bodies to heal. But again, just to emphasize, it doesn't mean that self-healing is a lonely one-man job.

00:35:30 Sarah: No, it has to be. No, it doesn't have to be. It can be if you want it to be, but it doesn't have to be. And there's plenty of resources out there, whether that's people, whether it's information on the Internet, whether it's listening to podcasts, there is information to help people. But as I say, sometimes I like to be quite blunt with my clients because sometimes they need that little nudge to snap them out of their autopilot responses and really dig into what's really going on. And you don't even have to go to somebody for months and months and months. You can go to somebody for one or two sessions just to really kick start you. But conversely, if you want to go to coaches, there are coaches out there that will take you on for as long as you need and support you as long as you need. But ultimately it is ourselves that do the healing. A coach doesn't heal us. A coach helps us to remember that we are natural healing beings and we just need to tap into that body wisdom and understand and support our body on its own healing journey. 

00:36:37 Chazmith: Absolutely. In all the experience that you've had so far, through gathering stories and testimonials for your book and coaching and helping support other people on their journeys, what are some of the bigger diseases or sicknesses or illnesses that you've witnessed people recovering from that people often believe are irreversible?

00:37:01 Sarah: Well, things like cancer, things like multiple sclerosis Most people, when they get a diagnosis of MS, think that's it, wheelchair bound and a short life, but it's not true. Motor Neuron Disease, which is ALS in America, Autoimmune Disease. In the doctor's training, they're trained to identify the symptoms, put them together into a diagnosis, and then prescribe a medication for that diagnosis unless they've done some training outside of that and understand how we can support our own body to heal naturally. Outside of pharmaceuticals, most doctors are not able to help people to tap into that and do that. And that's why we get labels of chronic conditions, lifelong conditions, life threatening conditions, and actually we can heal those, even Lyme and Autoimmune. And recently I had a gentleman on Twitter follow me and bought my book and said he'd healed his Asthma. And I saw somebody say, well, how did you heal asthma? I read Sarah's book and just thought, well, I'd just wait and see when I have an asthma attack, see what happens. And he said, and it wasn't too bad, so I didn't reach from my inhaler and he said, had another attack since. And so it's about helping people to understand that the body is that Natural Healing Machine, if you like, but we have to support it. But doctors can't really see outside of the medical model that we're able to do that.

00:38:34 Chazmith: Right. From your experience and what you've seen and witnessed, you said people healed from things like cancer, MS, ALS, autoimmune disease. Is there a pattern where they are all generally acknowledging and improving and healing through all the capacities, like mind, emotion, physical nutrition, exercise, sunlight? Is all of that usually all encompassing or is it vary from person to person in your experience?

00:39:02 Sarah: From what I see personally, some people do all of it holistically: the mind, the body, the heart, the soul. But some people just tend to focus on the physical and do have I mean, if you're going to do something towards healing, it's always going to be beneficial. No changes that's ever made is ever wasted. So if you're supporting your body just by eating better and hydrating better just in the physical, you will still go some way towards healing. But you won't heal fully, permanently if you don't address all of the issues. The hardest one for most people to tackle is the emotional because they don't want to pull out that can of worms that they've tucked away and put a lid on and deal with that. But the one thing I will say is that because I've dealt with my past, I was sexually abused at the age of nine, sexually assaulted as a young adult, grew up in a home that my parents divorced when I was very little. We lived with our uncle. So I got a lot of sort of not normal childhood traumas, if you will, when I was younger. And once I went into that and understood that people are all a product of their life's experiences, it was much easier for me to say, okay, I'm not condoning the behavior, but I understand how it could have happened and to forgive and to let go. Because as long as we're keeping it tucked down with a lid on, the emotions associated with that trauma will spill out into our everyday lives. And we won't see it, we won't identify it, but it's that emotion coming from our past. Whereas once we've taken the courage to open that address, it heal it by forgiving whether it's the person or their soul. If you can't forgive the person, can you forgive their soul and let it go? Once we've let it go, we stop carrying that weight around with us and the emotions associated with it no longer spill out into our lives. So if we can sum up the courage to open that trauma look at it for what it was, understand it, heal it, forgive it, let it go. It dramatically alters our lives massively.

00:41:17 Chazmith: Yeah, it sure does. It's a process. So it's not easy. By all means.

00:41:23 Sarah: No, it's not.

00:41:25 Chazmith: Curiosity. What is life like for you now? When you get a healing expression or like a new symptom? When you have a new symptom show up in your life, how do you approach it now, today? Differently than you would have in the past.

00:41:39 Sarah: Okay, so I'm actually expressing eczema again at the minute. The reason is because I have just won a podcasting competition and I'm about to go setting up my own podcast. And whilst it's exciting, it is causing me a bit of anxiety about being on a podcast, on video, talking to people, or just on video doing my own. So my skin is expressing Eczema because of the anxiety and some anticipation of what's to come in seeing it. I treat it with some cream that I make myself from Olive Oil, Coconut Oil and Beeswax. And I take time out now every day to do a little bit of meditation. I walk the dog and I do a walking meditation. I ground myself because I live in the mountains up in Spain. So I really become conscious of what I'm doing and how I'm doing it so that I'm not exacerbating the anxiety and stress that I'm feeling about what's to come and in anticipation of what's to come. And I just see it now as it's a new door opening. It's an excitement. It's exciting times and become more conscious of it because it's so easy to run our lives in autopilot, just moving from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, without really thinking about what am I doing right here, right now... How am I breathing? What's the temperature like? What's around me? We very rarely ground ourselves in that present moment. So I've thanked the eczema for turning up because it's shown me now that I need to slow down, reground myself, so I deal with it by doing that. Whereas in the past I'd have put this cream on and just continued. Now I'm thinking, no, it's here for a reason, it's a message and I need to slow down.

00:43:29 Chazmith: Yeah, it always is, isn't it?

00:43:31 Sarah: Yeah.

00:43:35 Chazmith: Okay, so you're going to be starting a podcast. You've got a book, you have a program out. What else are you up to?

00:43:44 Sarah: That's a lot of things, isn't it? It is just working with clients periodically and I mean, my book and my course sell themselves. I don't have to do anything about that. So I'm actually doing more research, ready to organize some of my podcast sessions and I need to get some of those recorded. I've reached out to people to be guests and I've got 25 people confirmed already.Mainly they're people who were on the Live Heal Yourself summit with me and people from my book. So I need to collate all that and organize some dates to get them interviewed.

00:44:20 Chazmith: Nice. Sounds like it's busy in a good way, though.

00:44:25 Sarah:  Yes, absolutely. Because ultimately, like myself with you now, we're changing lives. We're putting the information out to people to help them to help themselves.

00:44:35 Chazmith: Yeah, absolutely. So is there anything that you feel is pertinent and important that you're passionate about sharing with people to help them that I haven't given you a chance to talk about yet?

00:44:46 Sarah: I think we've covered quite a lot, actually. But the biggest thing I would say is see if you can reduce stress in your life, because stress is how you're viewing your life through the lenses that you've created, through your life's experiences. It's not the issues themselves that's causing stress, it's how you're viewing those issues and your thoughts and your beliefs around those issues. Take a really good look at if you're feeling stressed, why can you change your belief around it? Can you reframe it? But also when you're triggered I'm not a lover of that word, but it identifies that people get angry or sad or upset from something, hearing something, seeing something. What is it within you that's triggered by that whatever it was that you heard, saw, witnessed? And what is it that you need to heal with inside you? Because the trigger is identifying an area that you need to heal inside of you. So sit with that feeling and identify. Where does it come from? What is the emotion? What is the belief underpinning that emotion? And where does that belief come from? And is it really mine? Or have I borrowed it from somebody else when I was younger and made it my own until now, when I've become aware of it, does it really work for me now? Or can I change that belief?

00:46:04 Chazmith: I love that it's so important, so important. And people who are doing this type of deeper healing work totally get that. But sometimes when people aren't willing to have these confrontations with themselves and do that, it's funny to watch how life can pan out for people who are so absolutely committed to a belief that perhaps wasn't theirs to begin with. We pick so many things up from parents and teachers and pastors and family and friends, and if we don't question it, we hold on to it and allow so much of our life to be transformed by it when it might not even be true to our deeper self.

00:46:46 Sarah: Absolutely. And these people are influential on us, and it's from our childhood, as you've just said. So when we're children, we just take it all in like sponges, and we don't process it, we just accept it for what it is. It's now that we're adults, we need to start processing that. Is that really my belief? Do I really believe that?

00:47:11 Chazmith:  Yeah. I think curiosity has been one of my single handed, most wonderful gifts. I am so grateful that I developed a sense of deep curiosity to question everything about my belief systems. And it's definitely invaluable.

00:47:27 Sarah: Absolutely.

00:47:28 Chazmith: I have one final question for you that I ask everybody, and that question is with everything you're sharing in the world. If you were told from today forward, you can only share one message with the world, that's it. For the rest of your life, you have one parting message with the world. What would you want to spend the rest of your life sharing?

00:47:52 Sarah: Love is always the answer. Love yourself. Love who you are because of what you've been through. Love the people that love you. Love the people that don't love you. The people who don't love you make your life difficult. Do so because you trigger in them something that they haven't healed. It's not about you. So just love.

00:48:12 Chazmith: I love that. I love love.

00:48:16 Chazmith:  Oh my goodness, Sarah, how can people connect with you?

00:48:19 Sarah: You can find me on my website. I have rebranded, but it's probably easiest to go to my name SarahD.com and you'll be redirected to my new website. All my social media platforms are on there. My course is on there, my books are on there. Anything you need to know will be on there. How to get hold of me. SarahD.com.

00:48:37 Chazmith: Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing your story, giving us some valuable insights and for writing a book and bringing a whole collection of stories together. That's really wonderful. And yeah, just thanks for being you and for what you're doing in the healing community.

00:48:55 Sarah: Oh, thank you too. It's just been so wonderful to speak to you, but also to help other people through your podcast to start their own healing journey and to help themselves.

00:49:05 Chazmith: Yeah, awesome. Congratulations on your podcast and good luck as that all transpires. Thank you so much.

00:49:14 Chazmith: That is a wrap for today and as always, my hope for you is that in this episode, you walk away with either some new insights or new inspiration to help you on your personal journey. If you have found value in this week's podcast, please consider leaving a five star review and share this episode with a friend or on your social media tagging me @ourpoweriswithin. Also join my Facebook group. It's off to a slow start, but. I have high hopes. I truly think it will be a wonderful way to connect with each of you and hear from you. Create a space that you can share topic requests or guest requests or even just be supported on this journey. Also, if you do want to share with the group is a great place to do this. And yes, I am excited to read and listen to your wins and then share them with those that aren't there yet. Thank you for your contribution. Thank you for supporting this podcast. Thank you for helping me with my projects and friends. Until next time make this week great.