The Wheel of Vitality and Healing
A System to Help You Heal from Injuries, Prevent Them from Happening and Stay Strong in Your Body
I’m excited to introduce this blueprint called the Wheel of Healing and Vitality.
This is a flexible path designed to help you if you’re healing from injury, dealing with chronic pain, waking up with strange pains that seem to be coming out of nowhere or looking to improve your health, quality of life and prevent future injuries.
It is the product of 30 years of investigating health, well-being and the body, including the last 22 as a Thai Massage teacher and therapist to well over 10,000 people.
It’s also the product of my own personal journey and what I’ve been using over many years to help recover from my own injuries, aches and pains, and to help enhance my quality of life.
This includes long-term back pain, chronic hip pain, badly bruised ribs, sprained ankles, strained calves, wrist and forearm tendinitis, tight shoulders, neck pain and a whole lot more.
This wheel is at the heart of videos and training I will share with you going forward to help empower you to be your own self-healer and improve your health.
In upcoming articles and videos I will put the wheel in motion so to speak to help address back issues and you can use it hopefully to help unwind all kinds of aches, pains and knots in your body while strengthening yourself at the same time.
It can be of great assistance to you, no matter where you’re at on your journey.
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I want to preface this by saying that promoting vitality and healing from injuries is complex, it requires patience and a long-term view, even as we focus on actions that you can take right away to help yourself.
This blueprint reflects that.
At its core what it says is that to produce the best results is both an inner and outer journey that requires a mix of all of the components of the wheel.
What is also likely true, is that for many, you already spend time and resources in one or several aspects of the wheel and you’re deep into your journey.
Part of my intention here with this wheel is to help you be your own chef. To present the core recipe that will then be an invitation for you to tweak the ingredients and put more focus on the areas that make the most sense to you at any particular time. It is to help empower you to be your own self-healer with a system that can provide great support on the journey.
With all that being said, what is the wheel of healing and vitality and how does it work?
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At the center of the wheel are two core principles:
1) Consistency in action. A willingness to make health and vitality a daily practice, and perhaps ultimately an every moment practice. That’s the goal, even if it seems like it’s a million miles away.
2) Loving Kindness. This in part recognizes that having daily practices is hard. Changing habits is hard. And it’s harder when we’re hard on ourselves. Tapping into qualities of kindness, compassion, loving kindness and directing that energy towards ourselves, especially when we’re not meeting our desired targets is the secret to long-term success and the secret to long-term change. Loving kindness helps you to embrace the journey more than the destination. And what it also helps you to do at the deepest level is unlock an infinite source of energy, of healing qualities that already live in every cell of your body. Everyday when you go to sleep, your body, your cells repair themselves on an unconscious level. Cultivating loving-kindness and compassion will help you exponentially in bringing that unconscious ability to the surface and that makes it the most potent driving force to help heal, to help motivate, to make living well an ongoing expression of joy, beauty, creativity and exploration.
As we cultivate and embody these core principles we then engage in the practices around the wheel that are most needed on your healing and vitality journey.
And on any given day, you may decide which of these practices to lean into more than the others based on your personal journey.
Therefore it all Starts with Mindfulness
Mindfulness is making a conscious choice to be engaged with the present moment. That includes getting to know your body profoundly, deeply as much as possible. And recognizing that your body is changing every moment. There are so many factors that make your healing and health journey unique to you. And the more you have a deep relationship with your body and get to know yourself, the more you are empowered to make choices that best serve you and do them safely and effectively.
Knowledge is power and first and foremost that power comes from practices that help you get to know yourself.
Meditation is one practice. And so is having a relationship with your breath, noticing yourself as you go through your day. Journaling, having a gratitude practice, communicating and sharing deep truths with trusted people. There are lots of ways to cultivate mindfulness and we will definitely be doing that here.
Massage and Self-Massage
I think this is one of the least understood aspects of healing and preventative medicine. In the West we often see it as a luxury, as opposed to a necessity. But the reality is our body is working hard for us every moment. When you give your body opportunities to relax when you’re conscious, or bring awareness to areas of need when you’re conscious in ways that are in deep alignment with your body, then that unlocks your body’s internal pharmacy to help heal itself.
As we see with chronic pain, or those mystery injuries that emerge, even if you are physically active, the healing time when we sleep is not enough.
Time spent getting massaged or massaging yourself is precious and essential.
At the same time, I know that going to get massages is expensive and potentially not in your budget to do it as frequently as needed.
But with self-massage there are incredible low and no-cost solutions.
And even if your budget is vast, your time is limited. It is not practical for most of us to get daily massages, let alone several times a day massages. But sometimes that’s what’s needed when you’re healing from an injury. We will get into all of this and the low-cost tools you can use to help heal your injuries in future videos.
Myofascial Yoga
The other obscure subject matter for most of us is this one. Myofascial yoga refers to ways that target, release, and reprogram the fascia of your body. Fascia is the connective tissue of your body, including your tendons and ligaments, but it is so much more. It is its own system of intelligence that helps you stay in alignment. It’s the scaffolding of your body. The deep inner-support structure that supports all the other parts to help do their job.
When you hurt yourself, or you sit in positions for hours that put stress on your muscles and joints, your fascia changes in real time to support these changes. Those changes are necessary to help you walk again more quickly, throw again when you hurt your shoulder, run again, if you break your leg.
Our fascia is quick to adapt to these new realities, but slow to return to the most optimal alignment that you had before your injury.
Those slow changes are a HUGE source of the mystery aches and pain we continue to experience, sometimes for years after we think we are healed from injury. And they tend to come out more as we get into our 40s, 50s and beyond.
They are a leading contributor to the stiffness and loss of mobility you may be feeling as you age or that is so often associated with aging.
And wonderfully, there are both active and passive ways we can access our fascia to help retrain itself into healthier alignments that get right to the source of so much of the pain and discomfort in your body.
We’ll spend plenty of time learning these methods together to help make a dramatic impact on your health and well-being.
Dynamic Stretching
This is what we often think of when we think of yoga, or the stretches we do before and after a workout. This kind of stretching promotes flexibility, pliability, range of motion to our muscles and joints. It helps us to have better balance, and support for our body, just to name a few of the benefits.
Personally, I like to integrate dynamic stretching with other aspects of the wheel. That may include myofascial yoga or especially the next one. Strength building. They can all go hand-in-hand. At the same time, on a given day you may recognize that you want to learn more into myofascial yoga, and on others, dynamic stretching and strength building.
Eventually we’ll design a weekly program that you can use that includes a mix of each.
Strength building and Core Workouts
Cardio is included in this category. Cardio is essentially strengthening your heart and circulatory system. Strength building increases muscle mass in all the parts of your body. And your core specifically refers to your mid-section, including your lower back, glutes, hips and abdomen. When you have more strength, you have more stamina, more ability to get things done. It also reduces the work your body needs to do to maintain homestasis, that balanced state.
One thing being a massage teacher for so long has taught me is that when you have a weak core for example, other muscles and parts of your body will have to work harder to help take the load off of your lower back. That can lead to neck and shoulder pain, leg pain, foot pain, you name it.
One of my core understandings of the body, is that from the inside out, our body only knows itself as one body. It doesn’t know it has a shoulder, head, knee and toe. When it is lacking in one place, it will ask for help from somewhere else to support the whole. That is how we are wired. Loving kindness and compassion that we talked about lives in every cell of our body. Those parts will say “how can I help” knowing that it is all for the greater good.
As such, when you make the weaker areas stronger by building or maintaining strength, the reverse effect is that other areas that have been over working don’t have to anymore, and those pains that you’ve been feeling for so long can reduce significantly or disappear altogether.
Healthy Consumption
This refers to the all the things we consume. That can include food and drink. It also includes stimulants, medication and even the ideas we expose ourselves to and that which we don’t.
I know this is such a touchy and personal subject as well it should be. In fact for me, I intentionally put Healthy Consumption right next to Mindfulness, because I believe that if you want to make changes to what you consume, the best way to do it is by listening and continuing that path of getting to know your body. The more you do so, the more you know what really serves you and what doesn’t.
I don’t believe in one-size fits all solutions here. I am also not anti-Western medicine.
But I do think that when we’re talking about health and vitality, food and all that which we consume -or don’t consume- is medicine. It is an essentially part of the journey and I invite you to embrace that as part of your life journey.
I think many of us know what best serves us and what doesn’t when it comes to consumption. Whole foods, less processed foods, staying hydrated, eating until you’re mostly full, but not stuffed etc. And as you work with these principles, I would offer to return to the core of the wheel. Consistency in action and especially loving kindness. Being kind with yourself will help immensely in bringing out the results that you seek.
It's a topic we’ll return to in the future.
But there you have it. The Wheel of Healing and Vitality.
Two inter-connected principles put and keep the wheel in motion. And then there are six essential ingredients to draw from to design your ideal path of healing and vitality.
We are going to put the wheel in motion starting with a series on back pain.
Your comments, feedback and suggestions are essential as we build this. Give it a heart if you like this knowledge, and drop me a line with any questions, additions or feedback you have.
And don’t forget to subscribe so you stay up-to-date as we drop more content.
So excited to be on this healing and learning journey with you! Talk to you real soon.
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