How Healing My Nervous System Changed my life

What if your deepest struggles could become your greatest source of strength? In this deeply personal story, Jen shares the raw and authentic story behind the creation of Exalted Health and the stumbles it took to get where she is today.

Join us on a journey through the challenging landscapes of chronic illness, a cancer, Lyme disease, and a nervous system stuck  in fight/flight. 

You'll hear about the pivotal moments that led to the discovery of inner healing and somatic tools, and how these powerful approaches transformed a path of struggle into one of profound healing and hope. This is more than just a story; it's an invitation to feel seen and a testament to the resilience within us all.

If this story speaks to your heart, please subscribe to the Finding Your Peace: A Nervous System Regulation Podcast and share it with someone who might need a message of hope. Together, we can build a community of support and healing.

Mentorship

Virtual Inner Healing and the Nervous System Class: 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Welcome back to the Regulate Your Nervous System podcast. Um, this is the second episode from the rebrand. And I woke up this morning just absolutely bursting from the seams, uh, feeling like I needed to just come on here and share my story again. Because in my quiet time this morning, I was just blown away by all the Lord has done in my life the last decade or so, but specifically the last handful of years, and how much regulating my nervous system has not only changed my life, but the the lives of my entire family and just so many people around me. And so I just really wanted to just come on here and just share. Um, if you haven't listened to any of my other episodes and don't know my story, I had suffered with chronic illness for pretty much my whole life. Um went undiagnosed and for a very long time. Um, when I was uh 20, I had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a very aggressive form of cancer. Um, was given a terminal diagnosis, wasn't really expected to live through that. Um by the grace of God. Uh I'm still here. Um, I had an incredible oncologist, an incredible team at the Mayo Clinic that that really saved my life. Um, I did some experimental drugs at that time that um were really to brand new to cancer patients, and it really did save my life. But I walked out of chemo still super sick. Um, chemo is very hard in the body. I had been battling, you know, chronic illness that had gone undiagnosed for my entire life. And that was really when I started discovering um holistic health and holistic practitioners way to really support my body and support the organs of my body so that I could decotox correctly. Um and throughout the course of that, it really changed the trajectory, but I still struggled. Um, then when I was 32, I uh contracted Lyme's disease along with my youngest son. Um, and that that was really hard to um imagine having two little kids. Um, both of my kids were really young at the time. My youngest was only 18 months. Him and I both had Lyme's disease. We caught his right away. Um, although he still had some major complications and co-infections and side effects from that. Um, in my life, I went undiagnosed for three years. My symptoms were completely different from my son's. Um, and I think it was his was so acute and chronic that we were so busy taking care of him that mine kind of crept in slowly and then began uh like a 13-year battle with just being really, really ill. That's not quite accurate, but maybe more like a 10-year battle because the last couple of years I've been doing really well. Um, but during that time I discovered functional medicine, which is just a little bit different than holistic medicine, um, and found a functional medicine doctor that really saved my life and my son's life and helped repair a lot of our organs, helped repair a lot of the tissues within our bodies. Um, but what I would find is after that, um after we'd gotten out of the chronic phase, is that um we'd kind of treat one area of my body, say my pancreas or my gallbladder, and then all of a sudden my liver would be acting up. And it just kind of kept moving around my body like that. And it was during that time um that I had a friend introduce me to inner healing. And what inner healing is is dealing with the emotional aspects that can have physical consequences. So, for instance, unforgiveness. Unforgiveness can very much live within the physiology of your body. And if you have unforgiveness trapped, uh, you can it can have physical consequences, right? And even science knows this. This is outside of even the faith realm, they know this, but it's very common within the faith. And so I started learning about inner healing. Um, I had walked most of my life without the Lord. Up until this point, I wasn't saved until I was uh 26. And so I had a lot of healing to do. I had a lot of things that I had participated in that had um consequences, right? When we we live in sin, there's lots of things that can open the doors to um the enemy to just really kind of wreak havoc in your life. And so when I started learning about inner healing, I started getting a lot of those things shut, going through my own inner healing process, going through my own forgiveness process, dealing with anger, dealing with all of those yuck that can keep us really sick, right? Because we know that the spirit, soul, and body are all deeply, deeply connected. Um, and about this time, you know, I had gone through a lot of inner healing and I'd seen massive improvement, especially just in my mental state and my health. But what I found is that I still felt like I was in fight or flight all of the time. Um, my family had been through some really, really hard things. And, you know, I was raised in a home where I maybe didn't feel um like I was able to express emotions all the time. And so my only coping mechanism was to just kind of shove everything down. And it became apparent that um I needed something beyond the inner healing because I was still felt dysregulated all the time. I still felt on the verge of anxiety all the time, I still felt stressed all the time, I didn't sleep well, and I felt like that was really a key component to keeping me sick. And I knew all about the nervous system before this, um, just from my own undergrad degree. My son had been through some just really severe sensory things from just some things he was born with from the Lyme's disease, from developmental delays. We'd been through a lot of occupational therapy. That was what my undergrad degree was in anyway. So I had a lot of knowledge, but no one was talking, you know, five or six years ago about how to regulate your nervous system and how much of a role that could play in overall health. And so it was about this time that the Lord started talking to me about my nervous system and how it was time to really take control. Um, I had been, we 2020, this was around 2020-ish in that area. And we, I know the whole world was stressed at that time, but we had some pretty intense personal things going on and top of that that were really causing me to live in a constant state of anxiety. And uh, even though I had healed a lot of the chronic stuff, I was sick all the time with like colds and flus and just never felt good. I was always run down, chronic fatigue syndrome was thrown around. Um and I really just found myself uh sitting with the Lord and just asking him, okay, Lord, there's more to this. How do we heal the nervous system? And so I started digging in um to the nervous system and how it worked and what was involved with um just being at peace, right? I was walking with the Lord by this time, and I would notice a distinct difference between people that really lived out the peace that scripture tells us about, and people that kind of just dabbled in it or felt like for my personal story, I felt like I had to work so hard to get to peace and I didn't know how to maintain it. And so I started digging into um some different tools um called somatic tools that really help regulate and release a lot of things from the nervous system. And I started applying them to my own life. I started um digging into all of the awful ways I communicated with my own body. Um, if you have followed me for any amount of time, you know I've written a book called Bless Your Body, that is really a 40-day journey on how to change the language on how you communicate with your body. For me, I had a horrible body image that was not only contributing to how I felt about myself externally but internally. And that was contributing to a lot of factors. I also had a lot of bad habits, um, striving, trying to perform people pleasing that kept me really going a thousand miles per hour all of the time, all which can wreak terrible havoc on your nervous system. In addition to that, um, if you're never taught how to feel your feelings or that feelings are bad or wrong, um most of the time we just shove them down and we don't know how to process them. Even though I'd done all this healing to that point, you in inner healing, you are with another prayer minister and they're helping you walk through. So I'm like, okay, how do I take this and apply this to my own life? And don't get me wrong, there's a season for that. That is a lot of what I do now is that assisting other people and walking through, but there has to become a point where it becomes a lifestyle. And so when I started become combining inner healing with the somatic tools and just really taking care of my nervous system, and then later on added neurofeedback in order to increase the capacity of stress my nervous system could carry without sending me feeling like I was going off a cliff. All of these things have resulted in me being in a place where I actually know and understand what it feels like to live in peace now. And that was not something that I had ever experienced more than a passing glance of until just a handful of years ago. And so I really started applying a lot of these tools to my life. I started digging in to scripture to figure out where it applied in scripture because the Lord was really showing me that this was the key for a lot of people. It is not the answer for everyone, but those of us that have maybe had childhoods where we weren't really taught how to process things or we didn't feel safe in our own homes, or we had trauma at a young age, or even trauma as an adult, um, we can send our nervous system straight into fight or flight, and then we can get stuck there. And what happens when we're stuck in fight or flight is that we end up spending all of our time overwhelmed, stressed out, full of anxiety, panic attacks can occur. And if we never return to that place of peace where our body can reset, where our body can heal, where our body can think clearly, that's when chronic illness can start to take place. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that this is the only reason for chronic health problems, but it is oftentimes a contributing factor. After I started uh doing body work a handful of years ago, so I've been a coach for several years, I started integrating um body work, which is a lot of the somatic tools with the inner healing and helping women just walk through a lot of this stuff. What I started to notice is that there were trends. And the Lord really kept opening my eyes. People that had long-term chronic illness or more than one chronic illness were in a constant state of fight or flight. And then when their body was too exhausted, they would go to a place called hypoarousal, which would look look more like I can't get off the couch, I can't function. My brain doesn't feel like it's working, I feel like I'm in slow motion. And that is literally your body shutting down and saying, I can't live in fight or flight anymore. And so for years, I would oscillate between fight or flight and this hypo arousal or shutdown, and I would blame it on my chronic illness because I really thought that it was the chronic illness. And although that might have been a contributing factor, what was happening is they both were contributing and it just kept me sick all of the time. And so I started learning and applying all these tools to my own life and got to a place where I really was living in a place of peace. And then some more life happened. Um, again, if you've been following my story for any amount of time, that you know my dad died very suddenly in 2022. And um, my mom was left uh living in in Texas, and we live here in Minnesota, and we had to figure out a way to get her home, and it it was really a mess. And shortly after that, my mom got sick. Um, and we spent 18 months um really, really just trying to keep her alive um before she passed. And she was very, very sick um with lung cancer, and it was we were in a constant state of crisis throughout that time, and so within two months or two years' time, both of my parents died. Uh, and I had to take a lot of time off to take care of my mom. And what I was able to do is I was able to maintain um some level of peace. Now, in those really heightened situations, of course, I had some anxiety, of course, I had some stress, but I was able to apply all of these real-world tools during the hardest season of my life and be able to continue to function. I was able to continue to work when I wasn't taking care of my mom. And then after she passed, you know, we were able to take care of all of her estate and everything. Uh and even just a handful of years before that, I wouldn't have been able to handle one of those things without shutting down. Um, and I was able to handle that whole season without shutting down. Now, that's not to say I didn't rest. It's not to say I didn't take care of myself, but part of those tools are learning to apply a lot of these things. And so what I've done is I've been doing bodywork for for a few years now, and that's really helpful for a lot of people. However, what I found in that journey is I and I think that's always going to be relevant. I think people are always gonna need one-on-one help, they're always gonna need one-on-one um care. But what I found was missing from that is I can only do so much education when I'm like working with people and mentoring with people. What they really needed was a place where they could go to learn to apply these tools so they could apply them to every area of their life, so they could start to walk in that peace that I've experienced too. Because, you know, our bodies aren't looking for us to push, push, push through. Like our bodies need a softer place to slow down, to be loved in community where we can learn to regulate. And so last month I created and started a group mentoring program to help individuals learn to regulate their nervous system, learn and apply these tools. So when we're out there living in the real world, when we get triggered, when life happens, we have tools that we can apply in real time without judgment, without judgment of going backwards, so that we can continue to move forward. Because what usually happens is we get triggered, life happens, we don't stop to slow down because we're in crisis mode working through it. And we don't think straight when we're in that that place, right? We forget everything we know, every tool that we've used, and then we end up right back where we started, feeling completely unhealed, completely feeling completely dysregulated and not able to function the way that God designed our bodies. So if we can learn and apply the tools before the crisis happens, or even during, right? Um, so we meet twice a month over the lunch hour. It's a really quick call, it's 40 minutes. And my co-coach and I, um her name is Britney Wagner, and she's wonderful and lovely and knows so much. She's just so wealth of information. But what we do is every week we're teaching our community how to apply these tools, how to apply things when we get triggered. How do we rewire our brains to align with what God's word says, so that we're not living in a constant state of overwhelm and stress, so that we can live in homeostasis or peace or whatever you want to call it, that place where we feel clear, where we feel present, where we feel like we're able to connect with our family and friends in the way that we want to. And it's been life-changing for me. And that's why that's why we created this mentorship program. So there's no pressure to join. Um, I just want you to know that's available. You can find all of the information in the show notes, no matter where you're listening to this podcast. But even if you don't join us, if you gain something from my story and you're not quite ready to join the mentoring program, I also have an upcoming course. Um, this is a two-hour long course where we go just a little bit deeper in how to regulate the nervous system. I provide a couple of tools that you can help use. Um, and so that's coming up on October 22nd. We're gonna do a virtual one. I try to go back and forth between live and virtual because not everybody lives in the twin cities of Minnesota and I want to be able to serve people wherever they are. Um, so that one's also coming up on the 22nd of October. Um, that will be recorded if you're not able to attend live. So know that that's available. Otherwise, if either one of those options isn't the right fit for you, that's okay. Just keep coming back here and listening to different ways. We'll always be providing ways that you can regulate your nervous system on this podcast and the ways that it can just benefit your life. Because I will tell you what, I have been able to teach these tools to my children, to my husband, tons of friends, nieces and nephews, right? My brothers-in-law, my sister-in-law, and everyone uh tells me over and over again how much it can just change your life when you just have a tool at the ready when you need it. Because life is never gonna stop happening. Because we live in a fallen world and we live in a world where it's stressful. So if we can make that a little bit easier, we'd be happy to. So thank you for joining me and we'll see you next time.