Finding Peace and Natural Healing with Functional Medicine
If you want to move forward, you need to look forward.
“Whether you think you can or you can't you're right.”
Our beliefs are our beliefs, and our beliefs lead to our behaviors.
Many things can hold us back in life and the number one thing is usually ourselves.
Self-limiting beliefs affect all of us and we want to remember not to be pompous and selfish, but also don’t be completely self-sacrificing or self-sabotaging to prevent ourselves from achieving our goals and dreams.
If you want to move forward, you need to look forward. We may not know every step in the journey; we may not see every step along the staircase, but we still step forward in the pursuit with faith and optimism. If we instead look down, look around, or look away based on what other people tell us to think and believe about ourselves we’ll struggle to be able to focus on the truth of our own inner power and creativity to craft our paths forward.
So, let me ask you… where are you headed? Where are you going? What are your goals for the end of the year?
“I’m just trying to survive Jon, c’mon.”
I get it. I do, but I think most of us can expand our potential perspective and potential progress in life much more than we think – one of the best ways to exponentially leap in life is to ask others to join you in your journey.
When we instead close down our emotions to the world around us, believe we have to do everything alone or we can’t live to our fullest potential due to the fact the majority stake of our identity is caught up in another human or task we take in life… well, it’s not a very bright life for us to live, ya know what I mean?
So, I wanted to help us this week by sharing a few of my recent Podcasts all about Mindset and making massive change inside our personal understandings of self and to hopefully help us tap into our greatest potential, unleashing us to serve and show up in the world in a remarkable way.
Do it Scared – by Ruth Soukup – I’ve been a long time fan of Ruth’s since coming across her content as an easy share of awesome content and focus on pushing through our self-limiting beliefs. Check out any of her episodes on life, business, mindset, overcoming adversity and more.
Dr. Joe Dispenza is probably known as one of the greatest thinkers of our time when it comes to connecting dots between mindset, science, neurochemistry, community and physically visceral breakthrough moments. He’s an incredible teacher and trainer as well. He puts on conferences and retreats around the world. Here in this episode with the team from Food Matters, he helps provide some light on how we can shape our mindset, beliefs, and actions in this world.
On this episode of The Genius Life Podcast, Max Lugavere sits down with John Assaraf to discuss Mindset, Purpose, Passion, and how to use your story to your advantage and truly choose how to rewrite your story for the better if needed. Whether we believe we can or can’t, we’re correct.
Finding Peace with Functional Medicine
Man, I was more than a bit distraught when I came across this Wikipedia page talking about Functional Medicine, describing it as pseudoscience and QUACKERY!
It’s understandable, false…. but it’s understandable to see this especially in today’s current culture and censorship issues around complementary and alternative medicine topics. And if you knew the historical roots behind this feud, you probably wouldn’t be surprised either. For decades in the US, there has been an ongoing war between standard medical ideologies found in the West and those found around the world with a deep connection to the natural world, like Traditional Chinese medicine using food and herbs as medicine for thousands of years.
And in the past weeks we looked at a handful of common prescription drugs that are actually derived from plants, so it would make sense to believe plants can heal then, right?
I’ve also talked about Systems Biology a bit on my Youtube channel as well to help us understand how Everything Affects Everything in our infinitely interconnected ecosystem.
Now, I understand that in any field or in any way of thinking for that matter, there are outliers, imperfections, and extremists, and people who give a larger party a bad rep. Just take the food distributors who used stove ash as “black pepper” or horse meat as hamburger back in the day to maximize profits. There have been some dummy frauds in this field of medicine throughout the years I’m sure, followed by a lot of strong believers who were unable to comprehend or communicate to others.
But, I believe people who come across functional medicine find it after several years of feeling lost in the standard medical systems we have today largely based on fee-for-service brokerage between insurance and pharmaceutical companies without healing people from the inside out.
We spend more money on Healthcare than pretty much any other country in the world, but a lot and we don’t have anywhere near the greatest characteristics of health in this country, so obviously we’re not doing everything right and there’s obviously something wrong with the way our current systems are set up, such as ignoring the honest healing power of sleep and rest while we prescribe temporary fixes for only a short amount of time.
What if instead, we helped someone tap into healing, by helping them SLEEP!
This is why one of the primary steps inside my private health and wellness coaching includes helping people get good sleep. If we can’t sleep, we can’t heal. And for this reason also, I’ve been trying to reach out to brands and organizations to bring you some discounts for health promoting items that some people find to be helpful and supportive for their own personal journey in health and wellness.
As it pertains to sleep, many people try to use essential oils and maybe even melatonin, and while those are great when used appropriately, some people just simply need to close the curtains, stop staring at their tv and phone screens before bed, or perhaps use a bedtime mask to block out all light and allow the eyes to fully appreciate darkness like our ancestors knew. Here, I’ve included an affiliate link to a company called BluBlox, which is pretty well supported in the field of sleep. They are a popular solution that many people look to when they are looking for something comfortable and complementary to their lifestyle that support their sleep.
Some people like to use sleep masks or blue light blocking glasses and other strategies to promote their natural sleep and support their innate abilities to heal, repair and regenerate during sleep. Check out some of their offers if you need better Sleep.
You can also receive an additional 15% off with our unique discount code “zigzag” at checkout. To your good sleep :)
Functional Medicine looks to approach someone in their comprehensive condition in all aspects of their life with minor tweaks and education to help someone how to active health instead of simply applying expensive band-aids and going through surgery after surgery, medication after medication.
Functional Medicine is what first led me into my career in nutrition and dietetics with a deeper and much different perspective on medicine and healing after high school when my mom’s health was taking a toll from her battle with Crohn’s.
“Functional Medicine among other historical figures of medicine really focus on how disease can start with the gut.”
When she was given only 2 expensive pharmaceutical drug therapies to try with extensive lists of potential harms and risky side effects… I just wanted to learn more, pleading with the world, that there had to be more to this equation. I looked to the East.
I found traditional medicine practices, eastern medicine, and Ayurveda among others which all focus on the digestive system and help someone’s innate ability to heal – and with cheap ancient protocols using food as medicine, meditation, stress reduction and other natural healing practices. Functional medicine soon showed up on my radar, as it pulls from any and all ways of healing known to mankind throughout the ages.
And functional medicine led us through the last decade of our lives together, navigating her complicated physical health conditions with strategic adaptation and acute listening to how the body and biology respond to different seasons of life and seasons of wellness.
It’s no surprise my mom – like many people - felt wonderful while on vacation but seems to struggle a bit more like normal when we returned home from a Mother’s Day vacation this last year when I helped take her to Florida.
To see her smile with delight, walking the beach with the sand between her toes, giddily searching for shells…. was medicine in and of itself for me in my own personal journey, feeling stuck and stricken with equal peaks of frustration and ambition to help grow and nurture the world of health.
As we talked about in the beginning of this post, whether we think we can or we can’t, we’re right. Our beliefs and emotions definitely impact how we feel, how we can heal, and how we function overall.
Using principles of functional medicine, traditional perspectives, and easy mindful practices to promote health is exactly how I help educate and coach others through their own personal health journeys. I’d be curious to know what you think about functional medicine or if you have your own story with functional medicine you’d be able to share, let me know. I’d love to hear more.
If you’re new to functional medicine and interested in learning more, let me know and I’ll be happy to point you to all sorts of great resources to help equip and empower you in your own journey. And if you need some extra help navigating health going forward, you know how to get a hold of me. In the meantime, I wish you good health and thoughtful love and kindness to yourself as you breakthrough any self-limiting beliefs and commit to you living your best self.
If you like to hang out online, come find me and say hello! 😁
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If you missed last week’s edition you can check it out here: