Healing through God and gut health
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I have not released a new episode of this show in quite a while, and first of all, I want to apologize for that because I know that a lot of you really jumped on board with this show and you have reached out through messages and reviews and have said that you are eagerly waiting for more, and I feel like I have let you down.
And I'm gonna tell you why I stopped recording. I didn't stop recording intentionally. I knew where this conversation needed to go next, and I didn't know how to get there and I kind of froze, which is a strange thing for me because I've been podcasting for 10 years with my other show, success in mind.
But. This one, taking this show to where I feel it needed to go next, and the part of my story that I really feel compelled to share with you, I didn't know how to talk about that,[00:01:00]
which is kind of funny because this is a show about poop and ulcerative colitis. And yet the thing that I'm struggling to talk about right now is not poop. I can talk to you about poop all day long. I can talk about the disease all day long. Where I was struggling to find the words to get me into this episode is because this episode is about the spiritual side of healing.
This episode is about God. And I don't think I can fully share my story or my experience of this disease without talking about God. So I'm gonna warn you right now, if the word God is upsetting to you or uncomfortable to you, maybe this one isn't for you, then again, maybe it is for you. Maybe it's time to sit in the discomfort to connect to a part of yourself ~that.~
~Maybe you need to, I don't know. ~[00:02:00] I am not here to be a preacher, a minister, a rabbi for you. I'm just a woman who has a connection with God, and I know that that has helped in my healing. So if you are still listening, listen with a grain of salt, I'm just sharing from my experience what I have found and what has helped me.
And I'm gonna trust that you will take from it what you need to take from it for your own journey.
I was in remission for eight years and I thought the disease was gone. When it came back, it came back with a vengeance.
Looking back, I understand why it came back. I understand why it needed to come back as a part of my own healing, my bigger healing.
And it was about two years ago [00:03:00] in August. I had my breaking point with this disease. Now, I thought I'd had my breaking point before with this disease, but this was different. I could not take anymore. I had already started the biologic medication that I'm on Entyvio and I was still flaring up.
My doctor was saying I had to give it a few months to work. That Entyvio isn't fast. Sometimes it takes several months for it to start working, but I was out of patience. I had this moment. I was home alone. My husband was out and I broke down. I remember sitting in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, and I broke down sobbing uncontrollably and I said, God, I can't do this anymore.
I can't do it anymore. It's me, or it's the disease, but we can't coexist any longer. Not like this. I can't [00:04:00] handle it. You can handle it, so you take it, but it's the disease or it's me and one of us has to go now, so I'm giving it to you because I can't do it anymore.
And then I laid on my bed and I was crying and sobbing, and I don't even know for how long. Eventually, I calmed down the rest of the day was just kind of low key. I was feeling pretty low, and the next day, within 24 hours, my symptoms were gone.
Now, I feel like for me that this was a miracle. I feel like God listened to me and that he took it for me. I feel like this was my surrendering to God.[00:05:00]
And in that, I found so much peace. Very soon after that, I started getting all of these new insights about my illness and about myself. They came rapidly, like quick downloads, where I was seeing the disease differently and suddenly I was seeing the disease as a gift, not a curse. I started to reflect back and I could see how at every point when the disease was really active, when it was at its most volatile, it was because something in me needed to be healed.
And you might be listening to that and thinking, of course the disease needed to be healed, your colon needed to be healed, but something deeper needed. Healing in me. And when I thought about every time I went into remission, including that eight year remission that I had. I realized the lessons that came from it were for me
the first time I experienced colitis was when I was in my [00:06:00] preteens and it was pretty bad. I needed healing on the physical level. That's when the physical body is reaching maturity and I needed to heal and come to terms with my body.
It was really bad and it stayed active throughout my teens, but I was able to control it primarily just through basic medication, then it became really active and aggressive again in my early to mid twenties. It stayed active until I was introduced to NLP and hypnotherapy, and then I went into the eight year remission.
For quite a while I was chronically flaring up and at that time when I went into remission for those eight years, it was an emotional healing that I needed. I needed to heal on the mental playing and then when. This happened after the eight years and the things I did before weren't working. ~So medication, ~I wasn't responding to medication.
The [00:07:00] physical part of the healing was not, I wasn't responding to it, and I did all the things. I did eight years before I. Did ~heavy, ~heavy hypnosis timeline therapy, NLP techniques, and it wasn't working. This shifted my whole paradigm of what I believed about the work that I do, and it rattled me to my core feeling like that remission was just a coincidence and had nothing to do with all of the mindfulness work that I had been doing.
But through this, when these downloads started to come, when I started to get these insights dropping into me, I realized ~because this time, ~what I needed was spiritual healing. I needed God ~that ~no medication would work without ~that, ~that no amounts of hypnosis would work without that. ~And ~since then I have learned that through many different [00:08:00] practices, through ~uh, ~many different systems around the world, talk about these stages of life we go through and they make sense ~like.~
Through our teens. The physical body is in crisis. ~That's where the crisis is happening. That's where ~we're going through puberty. The body is changing ~very ~rapidly, ~and ~that's where I needed the healing ~was ~to happen on the physical plane. So I responded well to medication ~and then ~afterwards the healing had to happen at the unconscious level.
That's why hypnosis and timeline therapy worked so beautifully for me. ~Then that was where the crisis was. ~That's where the healing had to begin. And it put me into eight years of remission.
But this time the healing was spiritual. The crisis was on the spiritual plane. And for my growth, for my development, I needed to address that. I needed to get really real with God.
Now, I wanna be clear here ~that what I'm not saying, I'm not saying that. ~You just have to pray the disease away. That's not it. [00:09:00] And I'm not saying that if you do the same thing I did and you have a real honest conversation with God, that you're gonna wake up tomorrow and be fine. I am not saying that because what I don't want, and this is what has held me back from discussing this, ~what I don't want ~is for you to go, okay, I just need to pray and ~to ~talk to God for a few minutes ~and, ~and then be hugely disappointed if it doesn't work for you.
If you don't get the same result, I don't know why this worked the way it worked. ~I can't tell you that. ~I can just tell you that this was my experience.
So this is what has held me back. This is why I haven't recorded anything for months, because I felt so called to share this part of the journey with you, and I couldn't find my way [00:10:00] into it without sounding like I'm preaching ~or telling you. You can just pray it away because I don't believe that. ~I believe healing happens on different levels.
~I believe that ~we are physical, spiritual, emotional, mental beings. Depending on where the crisis is happening, that's creating the disease, that's where the healing needs to begin. ~I also believe that ~that doesn't mean that we don't take the medication or we don't do things that support the physical body, that we don't do things that support us on the mental and emotional planes.
~We, ~it doesn't mean that we ignore those things. ~This is what I truly believe. Healing is ~healing requires a holistic approach. ~And ~when I say healing, ~I wanna be also clear here that ~I'm not saying the disease is gone. ~I have had, ~in the last two years, I've had little blips, ~I call them blips. I don't know what the technical term would be.~
Not full flareups, but I have been made aware that the disease is still there. It's just at a very low level. ~It's just. It's remission. ~Clinically, I'm in remission. There's no sign of the disease, but it doesn't mean that I haven't had symptoms over the two years, and I treat them as [00:11:00] little warnings that I need to stay the course.
That if I stop doing the things that I do to manage this illness, it will come back. If I put myself in the same environment that created it, it will come back.
What I think is important here is not that moment of surrender, although ~it was a ~looking back ~at the time, ~it was ugly. It was a horrible experience. It felt raw and ugly Looking back, it was a beautiful moment and I'm so grateful for it.
~But I, ~it doesn't mean that I stopped taking the medication. I still go for my infusions every four weeks, but my body suddenly started responding to it, and I believe that was the work of God that suddenly this medication started working. Things started working. I had hope again, my mindset shifted [00:12:00] again.
This is what healing is. Healing needs a holistic approach. We are not just one dimensional beings. We're not just a physical form that we have so many layers to us, and healing is required, maybe not always, but when you're dealing with a chronic illness, when you're dealing with a major health crisis, healing has to happen on all of these planes.
And this time, for me, the key was the spiritual plane. ~Now, ~this wasn't new to me. I've always had a connection to God since I was a little girl. ~I've always had, ~I never call it praying. ~I don't know the word. ~Praying sounds so formal. I just say I have conversations with God and I've done that from a very young age.
~Um, ~probably most days of my life, at least. A little, a little short conversation. No one taught me ~to do it. I don't know how I knew how ~to do it. I have just always had these conversations with God, and I remember [00:13:00] doing it from a little girl just lying in my bed, talking to God about what was on my mind, ~or ~how I was feeling, or what I was worrying about, and it always made me feel better.
Through this, I came to see that without this disease, I would never have found my purpose. Without this disease, I never would've started a business. I started my business out of a necessity that I could no longer work for someone else, no employer would tolerate the amount of sick time and the unpredictability of this disease.
And that moved me into self-employment, and I found entrepreneurship, and I found a life I didn't even know was possible for me. So I started to see that this disease was not something happening to me, but it was happening for me, for my growth, for my evolution. ~And ~as soon as I stopped resisting it, ~and ~I started accepting that.
This is a part of my soul's journey. This is a part of my [00:14:00] experience in this lifetime, and it's not something horrible. It's not a curse. ~I mean, don't get me wrong. ~There are days when ~certainly ~it is horrible. If I have another flare up, I'm not gonna be ~all Pollyanna about it and ~excited that I'm flaring up.
Don't mistake me here. ~Uh, ~it's not a pretty disease, and it's painful and ~it's ~awful, ~and it can be debilitating. ~But the more I've realized that there are gifts in this disease, it's given me peace within it. And I know for some of you listening, if you're really struggling right now, that might seem so far removed from what you're experiencing right now.
And I didn't get to this place on day one. This was after over 30 years of the disease. I have found peace. And this is truly why I started this podcast. ~Yes, ~I started it because I wanted to share my journey with others, and I wanted ~people who are listening, ~people who are going through the same journey to understand that you are not alone ~in this experience.~
But I also wanted to give some hope and some light into what can feel like a really dark and [00:15:00] lonely journey.
Now, I don't know if you're listening to this and you're gonna start praying today, or you're gonna start talking with God. I don't know if that's for you or if that's what you want, but I don't think it hurts to try it.
~You know, ~I had a conversation with ~a client a while back, ~a former client who was ~going through a crisis, um, just ~going through a personal crisis. ~In his life, and ~I felt called to talk to him about this and to tell him that I felt at the time what he needed was to talk to God. ~And ~he said, well, how do I do that, Terry?
And I said, ~you, ~you just talk to him. ~That's all. ~Just go somewhere where you feel comfortable and you can ~talk and you just ~talk. Say what's on your heart, say what's on your mind, and ~just ~have a conversation. If you don't believe in God, the worst thing that will happen is you're just talking out into the ether for a few minutes, [00:16:00] but maybe it gives you some relief.
Maybe you will start to connect with God and realize that there's something bigger than you. ~I don't know. ~I don't know what your journey will be. Again, just sharing my story and what I experienced because I think it is a really important part of this story, ~and ~no matter what your spiritual beliefs are or your spiritual practices are.
It can be very grounding to connect to that part of you in whatever way you do it. If you wanna talk about the universe, if you want to pray to a different God, ~what, whatever it is for you, ~whatever your beliefs are, if you wanna go sit under a tree and connect to Mother Earth, and that for you is your spiritual connection, by all means do that.
~But. ~I think it is important that we don't ignore the spiritual components of this illness, of this disease, [00:17:00] because that's where you find hope. That's where you find the light. That's where healing can happen.
I think that's it for today. ~I think ~that's all I needed to share. I will get back to recording regular episodes ~now, ~now that I've gotten this off ~of ~my chest, ~off of my heart ~and have spoken this out loud. I know it was kind of messy. I feel like I was rambling and all over the place. ~Um, ~but that's just how it needed to come out.
If any of you have questions ~about this, ~feel free to reach out to me if there's anything you wanna talk about. Reach out to me. You can connect me on Instagram. I did set up an account for this podcast. I am not active on there. I literally just set it up so it exists. But you are welcome to reach out to me there.
~I will, ~I will link it all in the show notes or you can reach out to me on my main account, which is at the Terry Holland. ~I will link that one up to, um. ~I do monitor the what, the poop account, so I do monitor it if someone messages me. I [00:18:00] just don't really post anything there. You can also, if you're listening on Spotify, ~you can ~leave me a comment directly there as well.
~So ~feel free to reach out and please let me know if you've experienced something similar if this episode resonated with you or. If it didn't resonate with you, I would ~love to hear that too. I would. I would just ~love to hear your feedback ~is what I'm saying ~in any aspect or if there's anything you want to discuss ~about it ~or share, I am open to it.
So thank you so much for listening. I appreciate all of you. And I'll be back again next week for some more. ~Oh, what the poop. ~Thank you again my friends, and bye for now. ~I.~
