The time my daughter nearly died and how her body remembered.

In 2010 my then 4 year old daughter underwent a dental procedure that almost ended very badly. She had broken two teeth in an incident with a swing. The teeth became abscessed and had to be removed. We were in a small town in South Africa at the time. The dentist organized with the doctor to have her teeth pulled under conscious sedation, right there in the doctor's office. Somehow something went wrong and all the alarms in that office went off. Her heart rate dropped like a rock and I felt my whole world collapse.

Everything turned out okay. And by okay I mean she was alive. We could take her home and get to hug her and hold her and see her grow up.

In the process of getting intubated, her two front teeth got knocked out, which lead to her having a lisp and needing speech therapy later. Other than that, I hardly ever thought about it again. I definitely didn't dwell on it.

A while ago, my daughter started myofunctional therapy. The therapist was very concerned about her tight jaw and very reactive nervous system and finally asked about trauma to her face. For the first time since it happened, I allowed myself to acknowledge that forcing a tube down a child's throat while everyone is freaking out that she might die, affected her physically and probably also left an emotional scar.

Yes, she was not awake and “conscious”, but her body remembered.

After the appointment I did a session for my daughter around that fateful day in July of 2010.

What I found was enlightening. I had to release a bunch of physical trauma energy, inflammation energy and psychological trauma energy. Every bone in her face was affected, along with the fascia and soft tissue. Her nervous system was affected and even though she was not conscious, she absorbed fear from the staff and shame from me. The sense of lack of control was so strong that it was still reverberating through her whole body. Her subconscious interpreted that tube as sabotaging her breathing and after that her tongue refused to rest against her palate, affecting not only her breathing and eating, but her facial shape, gut flora, anxiety levels and immune function.

I have worked with the fall-out of physical and psychological trauma with my clients many times before. This was the first time that I knew exactly what it was that caused it. It has been so rewarding to track the physical results of each session. Within days she could open her mouth much wider than before. She is less anxious and her whole body is more relaxed. She eats slower and her digestion is better. There is still a long road of healing from the trauma of chronic childhood illness ahead of us – for our whole family, not just her.

Today I am deeply grateful for the tool of energy work, and I am deeply grateful for this brave child whose journey got me into it in the first place.

Honor your emotions this Festive Season.

If you are one of the lucky ones who do not have all kinds of emotions coming up during the holidays, please do celebrate with wild abandon. For the rest of us, who have mixed memories and feelings, here are some tips to help you not just get through the next month or so, but actually use it to process some emotions and become healthier!

And even if the holidays don’t stretch you emotionally, we all have other times in our lives that bring up tough emotions. These tips are great for any emotionally challenging times.

When you feel a thing:

• Pause and recognize that you are feeling something uncomfortable.

• Set an intention to be interested in what you feel and NOT to judge it, numb out or distract yourself from it.

• Notice where you are feeling it in your body.

• Notice the physical sensations.

• Name what you are feeling, if you can. Otherwise describe it as best as possible.

• What is this emotion telling me I need? Comfort? Re-evaluation of a situation? Acceptance and surrender? To uphold a boundary? To change or challenge an old story I have about myself?

• How will I honor this emotion in taking the first step in meeting this need?

It might not be possible to go through all these steps while you are with your family. Use this as an exercise after the holidays to reflect, tend to some old wounds and set yourself up for a year of honoring your emotions.

Remember that tough emotions can be our wise guides to lasting change. Embrace them as teachers and a lot of healing and growth can come from it.

Happy holidays!

The path of desperation that lead me to energy work.

If you ask any child in elementary school what they want to be when they grow up, I doubt one of them would say “energy work”. This is not something I knew existed until I was introduced to it as a solution for my own sick child's health struggles.

My daughter had been sick since she was a tiny baby. She had chronic eczema that covered her whole body. She also had complicated digestive issues, a myriad of allergies (some deadly) and other immune related problems. After it became clear that we were not going to find answers in the standard medical world, we turned to alternative health practitioners. We visited naturopaths and homeopaths, had her hooked up to biofeedback machines and taught my tiny little girl to take a handful supplements each day. I consumed every bit of information about gut health, the microbiome, epigenetics and appropriate supplementation and treatments. I exhausted every possible resource to help my child. We traveled to see experts and spent upwards of $30 000 in our attempt to find relief for her.

Her health continued to deteriorate and I felt defeated and broken. Several doctors told us to prepare for a lifetime of immune disorders. This was when someone introduced us to a chiropractor who did energy work. We were very skeptical, but also very desperate. There was nothing to loose. Imagine my surprise (and delight) when woo-woo energy work ended up being the thing that finally changed her health and future.

My mind was blown. Before our experience with energy work no-one knew what to do with my daughter's health challenges. I was immediately intrigued and set out to learn this magical skill that saved my daughter.

And that is how I found my way to the weird side of health and healing.

Since I started doing energy work, I have seen incredible results in the lives of my clients and my own family. Every day I am more and more convinced that energy work addresses something in health, healing and also emotional work that we have neglected for far too long. As Caroline Myss says, we have a bio-spiritual ecology and healing starts where we cannot see it, in realms we barely understand.

Energy healing (or manipulating energy to enable healing) is a science or technology that we are only starting to be able to explore and barely able to understand. Yet I believe it is this very technology that will help people with confounding health problems, like my daughter, to finally be able to live a healthy, thriving life.

Learn to recognize emotions and stop suppressing them.

It seems that it doesn't matter what we are working through, at the root of the issue is often unprocessed emotions. In my work I find it astonishing that even the most debilitating physical symptoms often have unprocessed emotions at the core.

Getting to know our emotions so that we can stop suppressing them, is the most important thing we can do for our growth, health, relationships and general well-being. It is the thing I repeat over and over to every client in every session.

So what does this process really look like?

The first step is patience. There is no magic method that will make this change instant. It is a slow process of learning and loving yourself in it.

Start with situations that feel uncomfortable but not massively triggering or threatening. We all have “off” days when we just feel out of it, blue, not aligned. Start practicing this process on those days, with those vaguely uncomfortable feelings, rather than jumping into this process during your next argument or panic attack.

Here is a short run-down of how to get to know an emotion when you are experiencing it:

1. Pause and recognize that you are feeling something.

2. Notice where you are feeling it in your body.

3. Notice the physical sensations.

4. Name what you are feeling, if you can. Otherwise describe it as best as possible.

5. What is this emotion telling you? What do you need or is there an action you need to take? It can be as simple as needing to cry or be comforted; or more complex like re-evaluation of a situation or having a hard conversation.

6. How will you honor this emotion in taking the first step in meeting this need?

If you have difficulty with the last three steps, don't fret. Recognizing that you are feeling a challenging emotion and noticing how your body is responding is more than most of us do. It is a great first step and if it is all you can do in the beginning you are already starting to process emotions better, rather than suppress them.

The trick is to commit to doing this process. Don't judge how well you do it, what the outcome is or if it is “working”. It will eventually become easier and smoother and you will start to see changes that you didn't expect. As with everything in life the key to success is the willingness to fail a whole bunch of times.

Try this process out and let me know how it goes for you. You can also follow me on Instagram or Facebook where I post helpful videos about processing emotions and more.