Nature, Emotions, & Spiritual Connection as Healing Doorways

If you’ve ever thought, “I’m eating well, I’m doing the protocols, I’m taking care of myself and I still feel stuck,” this conversation is for you. 

We are continuing our conversation this month on the six doorways to healing by moving beyond the physical body and into nature, emotions, and spiritual connection as real, practical paths to energetic coherence.

Here's some of what we're covering today:

• nature as a healing doorway through grounding, sunshine, forest bathing, and time in wild water
• nervous system reset and circadian rhythm support including the three-day nature reboot
• emotional roots of dis-ease including trauma, suppressed feelings, and chronic stress patterns
• tools to move stored emotion such as therapy, somatic work, breathwork, EFT, and EMDR
• raising energetic vibration with gratitude, joy, love, fun, hope, and empowerment
• spiritual awakening as a pathway through meditation, prayer, purpose, and radical remission stories

If this conversation awakens something deeper in you and you want to go deeper, join me inside our Substack community or inside our coaching container (links below).

👉 Resources mentioned on today's episode:

1- Previous Podcast Episode on Emotions & Cancer

2- Previous Podcast Episode on Stress, Trauma, & Cancer Care

Please don't forget to subscribe, share this with someone who needs a new doorway, and leave a review so more people can find this path. 🙏

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Transcript

Welcome And Doorways Recap

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Ground and Root Podcast, where we explore the world of holistic and functional strategies to enhance healing and help you stay cancer free. I'm your host and holistic cancer dietitian Dion Detrez. We are continuing our conversation this month about the various doorways to healing. So at the beginning of the month, two weeks ago, our episode was focused on the first three doorways, right? Which were focused more on the physical body. We talked about removing disruptors, about nourishment, and about movement as three doorways in. And then last week we had Tina join us to talk about how dance and music and community connection can improve health and happiness and longevity and ultimately be another doorway towards healing, right? I hope you enjoyed that. I really was inspired by Tina's story and just again thinking about healing in a broader lens of all the different ways we can support our body in staying healthy. All right. Today, though, we are going to finish the doorways talk with the next three doorways. And the next three doorways are focused more on our emotional and spiritual body. So remember, I said this in the first episode of the month. I talked about how we are the overarching aim is for energetic coherence, right? Vitality, radiance in all of our bodies. We have the physical body, which is like the most obvious, the most we're like aware of, right? But then we also have our mental emotional body. We also have our spiritual body. And all of this encompasses our energetic body, right? And remember that dis-ease, right? So lack of ease in the body can begin in any of these levels. Oftentimes, it begins more in the energetic level and then eventually works its way into the physical. And it took me a long time to figure this out, you guys. I spent many years as a dietitian, probably at least a decade, before I realized that no matter how much good food we brought in and self-care practices and supplements and fasting and integrative therapies, for some people, they would still hit a wall in their healing. It wouldn't be enough, right? Or it wouldn't be enough to keep them cancer-free. It wouldn't be enough to keep them healthy. And it wasn't until I explored further out that I started to explore energetics and the emotional connection to cancer and disease and the spiritual connection to health and healing that I started to understand that there's really these different levels. And no matter how much we're focusing on the body, if there is incoherence, right, if there's a lack of resonance in these other energetic bodies, we will continue, it will continue to impact the physical body. Even if for a bit of time we have health and wellness, if our energetics are off, it is going to eventually manifest itself in the physical body again. So it is so important that we look at health and healing and cancer prevention, really, from this angle of supporting all of our different bodies. And if you're here listening to me, I'm assuming you feel the same, that we're on the same wavelength. All right. So we are going to dive in today to doorways four, five, and six. Are you ready? Let's go.

Doorway Four Nature As Medicine

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Doorway four, maybe my most favorite doorway of all, is nature, is reconnecting to the earth. And for some of us, nature is our doorway to healing or to staying healthy, right? Once we're on the other side of a healing journey. Now, what are some examples? And then we'll talk about why it's so beneficial. I think probably just inherently, intuitively, you're like, it feels good to be in nature, right? It feels good to be outside. We can feel that in our bodies, we can feel that in our emotions, right? But we may not always understand why that's how that's happening. So what are some examples? Okay, so it could be going for a walk, right? It could be going for a walk at your local park, it could be going for a walk in the woods, it could be hiking on the weekend if you have access to that, right? Like in the mountains, it could be or the foothills, it could be biking outside. So if you again, if you have like country roads, like where you're more immersed in nature rather than city streets, that's what we're referring to. Cause it's not just about movement. It's actually like being around nature, right? It could be swimming in wild waterways, jumping into lakes and rivers or getting into the ocean, right? So part of it is being around, being in it, could be going, we're about to head into summer. Well, we are headed into summer, right? We're like the third week of June. The summer solstice is right around the corner. It's already happened, depending on when you're listening to this. And for many of us, that means more time outside. It could also mean maybe taking some camping trips, right? Like getting in the woods, getting away from the cities, away from our kind of our modern technologies for a few days. This is big healing energy, being able to do this. It's not just vacation, okay? This can actually help your body heal. So give yourself permission to do it if you've been looking for a reason why. It could also be just grounding and connecting to the earth's energetic field. I talk about this a lot. It is one of the very first practices I teach every single client I ever work with, is about grounding, which is essentially just getting outside, even if it's in your backyard. It doesn't have to be super fancy. You just need to touch the earth with your bare feet, with your bare hands, right? You just need to connect to the earth's electrical field. It takes only 10 minutes, and your electrical field sinks with the earth's electrical field. It completely resets the nervous system. How amazing is that, right? So getting outside and grounding, sitting next to a tree, gardening, right? Getting your hands in the dirt, growing plants. That can be another way you connect with nature. Just being in the sunshine. Again, it's June, right? We're headed into summer. Being in the sun is a big part of this. And I would also say, too, just not feeling like you always have to be doing something when you're outside. I think a beautiful example of this is forest bathing, right? Where you literally go for like three hours and you just sit in the forest or walk a little bit, but you're not liking. You're not going on a walk. You're not, the goal is not to get somewhere. You're literally just being in the forest because there's incredible benefit from that, just being there, being next to the trees. So taking time to just rest and observe and be present with nature, right? Enjoying the ah, the wonder of nature. That's one of the reasons I think so many of us are drawn to nature, is just because it's like it's the wonder of it, the beauty of it, the reminder that life is so much more, right, than just our lived experience, like our day-to-day existence. It reminds us, it taps us back into that, which is powerful. So there are, of course, physical benefits to being in nature. And then, of course, there's a lot of really beautiful energetic benefits. So, some physical benefits. Obviously, if you're moving in nature, well, then you're gonna get some of those movement benefits, some of the exercise benefits as well, right? Being in the forest, even if you're forest bathing, you're not necessarily moving like walking or biking or something. You're gonna have improved oxygenation, right? From all the plants. You're gonna the sunshine. Oh my goodness, so many physical benefits from sunshine, right? Not just vitamin D boosts our immune system, improves melanin, which actually acts like a hormone in the body, has a bajillion benefits, right? And not only the immune benefits from the sun, but the immune benefits from nature, especially being around the trees. So good physical benefits, but also really good emotional and energetic benefits. Like I talked about the nervous system reset, right? Takes just 10 minutes. That is not much time, you guys, to connect to the earth's energetic field to completely reset your nervous system. So you can do that by physically touching the ground, the grass, the soil, the beach. It could also be immersing your body in wild water. So spending 10 minutes in the ocean, in a lake, in a river, right? You're also gonna get that grounding benefit. There's also the circadian rhythm benefits from being outside, being in nature, getting more sunshine, more outside time, less inside time, right? Or at least when you're inside, like I am right now, the window is open. There's no overhead lights on, right? Like I'm trying to stay connected as much as I can to the outside world, even though I need to do this in front of the computer and with my microphone. And another cool thing, I talked about the benefits of giving yourself permission to go camping if you need that. But there has also been really cool research around three days, okay. So basically a long weekend in nature. So let's say you go camping in the wilderness, three days in nature, away from your electronics, okay? We're away from artificial lighting. So you're really just following the sun. You're taking the cues from the sun about when you get up, but when you go to bed, it doesn't mean you can't still do a fire and all that stuff, okay? But like you're not being influenced by artificial lighting. Three days completely reboots your circadian rhythm. That's it. That might feel like a lot to do a long weekend, but gosh, so many benefits from that, besides just having fun. Yeah. And then, like I mentioned about enjoying the awe and wonder, there is a lot of documented research around this connection to the sacred, to the divine, right? To to nature as a tool to enhance your spiritual journey as well, right? Your spiritual wellness, your connection to something greater than you can be found in nature. So, doorway number four, probably my favorite one. And as we're heading into summer, this just that felt like a perfect one to start with today. To give yourself permission to go be outside as much as possible. All right,

Doorway Five Emotional Roots Of Disease

SPEAKER_00 10:53

doorway five is focused more around emotions and emotional healing. This is a really interesting one and one that I had zero training on as a dietitian. Okay, this did not come up at all in my professional training. I learned this much, much later. And my mind has been blown open since I've learned about this. And now it's so important to the work that we do that we start right off the bat with emotional wellness, right? We do grounding, we get people in nature, we start working on balancing emotions, moving stuck emotions. I even have a nervous system coach on our team who is focused primarily on teaching people how to work with their emotions, how to move energy in their body, because diet alone is just not going to do it. We really have to think about all these layers. So, more often than not, again, dis-ease, I like to think of those as two different words because like that lack of ease in the body, that lack of coherence has emotional roots at play, especially cancer. And there is some very interesting documentation around this. For some, resolving the emotional wounds, the trauma, the conflict that kind of began the cascade frees the body, much like removing the disruptors, frees the body to heal itself. So this is a really powerful one. And again, like really fascinating and inspiring stories of healing and radical remission by just focusing on emotions, by just healing, like emotional healing, and their body heals. So, let me give some examples of what this could be coming from, because it's some of it might be you might already be very aware of, and some of it you might not. It might be more subconscious. So, certainly any unresolved trauma or emotional wounds from your past that it could be causing is likely causing stuck energy in the body, right? Which is gonna then lead to this incoherence, this disharmony in your energetic field, which eventually influences the cellular field, right? Which makes it easier for cancer to grow. Obviously, it's a very simplified way to describe, but it begins a cascade that can result in dis-ease, whether that's cancer or something else, chronic pain, so many different things have been linked to unresolved trauma or emotional wounds. The book, The Body Keeps the Score, is a really good one to understand this process more. Now, holding on to negative emotions, even if it's not necessarily connected to some specific trauma or wound or conflict that happened, but just holding on to negative emotions. And when I say negative, I things like fear and anger and worry and helplessness, like powerlessness, some of these emotions will lower your energetic vibration. And if you recall me saying, I believe it was in the last episode, I don't think I already, I don't think I just said it. Otherwise, I my brain is not remembering. But cancer vibrates at a lower vibration, right? So negative emotions are more in the same frequency as cancer. If we want to shift that frequency, we have to raise the energetic vibration. Staying in negative emotions, staying in anger and resentment and grief and fear and helplessness or disempowerment is going to keep the vibration low. We are not going to heal in that vibrational state. Okay. Now there's something also very interesting here, and I'll make sure to link in the show notes. I wrote a I have a blog post where I wrote where I talk about this in a lot more detail. So if you're interested and you want to go deeper and you want to look at the research around it, I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes. But there's also this idea of a cancer personality making somebody certain personality traits that could make someone more at risk for cancer. And again, if we think about the emotional body, right, and how that influences our state of health, it makes more sense. So here's a few traits that are defined in this personality. Putting others before yourself, right? So people pleasing, everybody before me, avoiding conflict at all costs, suppressing emotions, especially the difficult emotions like anger and hostility and resentment, having a very high need for approval and acceptance from others, having a hard time coping with stress. So these traits now, in and of themselves, doesn't necessarily mean cancer is going to start to grow, but having these traits and then also having an emotional conflict, right? Having a wound or trauma or something shocking happen to you can begin the cascade of cancer's growth. And there's been really good research around this. So, like I said, I'll link to that blog post if you want to learn more. All right. So what do we do though with this information, right? Because most of us are dealing with some level of emotional challenge or trauma from our past or our childhood or even just family trauma, right? That could be playing a role too. Not just our own experience, but inherited family trauma could be playing into this as well, into our emotional field. So obviously, depending on what is true for you and your experience of life thus far, there are many times where getting professional support is the right way to go if you're not already doing that, right? To help you begin to move these stored emotions, the stored energy, the trauma, the wounds. For some, that might be therapy and taking a more talk-based approach. For others, it might be more somatic, like getting into the body and moving the energy. It could be working with a somatic therapist, it could be working with an energy healer, it could be working with certain techniques like EFT or EMDR. There's lots of different strategies out there. But sometimes we might need the actual professional support to help us start to move these things through, right? Now, some other things that we could do on our own, not necessarily with, we could still get guidance, but would be a little bit more within our control. Breath work, there's lots of different styles of breath work, but many styles are also very good at moving emotions, moving energy, helping you tap into subconscious patterns of what's stuck and what's what you're holding on to, and then getting it to come out, getting it to move. I feel like every single time, and I'm being a little bit vulnerable here, but I'm just gonna normalize it because I think this happens for a lot of people, is every single time I've done a guided breath work session, especially in person, I like sobbing by the end of it. So much emotion and energy is coming out, right? So breath work can be a really powerful tool to begin to move these energies. Remember, if you think about emotions and energy are the same thing, right? Emotion is technically just energy in motion. And if it's in motion, it's okay. If we're crying, if we're screaming, we're laughing, like we're feeling and moving the emotion. That is not a problem. That's good. We need to do that. We need to feel what's real. When we when we don't allow that, when we suppress it, when we tuck it away and say, I'm gonna do about that later, that's when it becomes a problem. Because that's when the emotion now is no longer moving and it gets stuck. Or I should say the energy is no longer moving and it gets stuck. So breath work can help get it out. Okay. Plant medicines can be really helpful too. And again, that might be like guided professional plant medicine journeys. It could also be using plants like, for example, flower remedies. And we use this a lot with our clients, and it can be very profound in shifting emotional patterns and beginning to ease the burden, creating more emotional harmony and coherence again, just by taking a flower remedy. And because it's working not like a supplement, it's really working on the energetic field, right? It is influencing the vibration of your energy, of your emotions. So I already said allowing emotions to move through. Yeah, that's another one. So feeling your rage if you're feeling angry, right? Like screaming into a pillow, punching a boxing bag, if that's helpful for you, crying when you need to cry. Don't apologize when you start crying, just let it go, right? That is cleansing, that helps us move the emotions through. And then the flip side of that is then we can choose more opportunities to raise our energetic vibrations. We talked about some of these negative emotions keeping us at a lower vibration, which is more matching with cancer. But when we have more positive emotions, that helps shift. We raise the energetic vibration, which is gonna change. Now we're gonna try to, we're gonna try to attune the cancer cells to this higher vibration, which is going to help with their healing and recovery. So, what are the emotions that help you do that? Gratitude is a big one. Starting a daily gratitude practice is huge at helping you shift this vibration. Tapping into things that bring you more joy, joy, laughter, fun, that is higher vibe, right? Love. Love is probably the highest vibration of all. Hope, optimism, empowerment, right? So tapping into those feelings are gonna are gonna start to shift the scale and bring more coherence back into the body. Honestly, probably the easiest place to start with all of this is to just start having more fun, following your pleasure, following your joy every day, giving yourself permission to have at least some amount of time during your day that is only for fun, that is for your joy. Because the more we hang out in that space, the higher our vibration becomes. Pretty cool, right? Who knew that having more fun could help us heal? But it can. All right. I think I pretty much let me just scan my notes. I think I pretty much explained as emotion, like how why these things are helpful, as emotions move through, right? We can process and they flow and our energy stays coherent. This obviously impacts our cells as well. We can also reverse that cascade I was talking about, right? When we begin to resolve and move emotional wounds or trauma, we shift the patterning. And the downstream effects of that are not just in our nervous system and in our mood, but actual physiological benefits too, right? We start to sleep better, our hormones become better balanced, our immune system starts working better. So we also have some physiological improvements. That helps us heal and stay cancer free. And like I mentioned before, but I'm just going to say it again because I think it is really important. The more we raise our vibration in whatever way that looks for you, okay, the harder it is for cancer to grow and for cancer to survive. So you really can give yourself permission to do the things that make you happy, that do the things that make you feel love and joy and fun. It is going to help your body heal. All right, last but not least, doorway six.

Doorway Six Spiritual Awakening And Healing

SPEAKER_00 22:34

This one might be a little bit more esoteric for some of you, but it has shown very profound healing impacts. And that is spiritual awakening. For some people, whether they were spiritual or not, before cancer becomes their doorway onto a spiritual path and towards spiritual healing. And there are some really beautiful radical remission stories of people following a spiritual awakening and healing their cancers. I highly recommend if you don't already have it, the radical remission book by Kelly Turner. She has some really beautiful stories in there. And some of them are like this are around spiritual awakening. So, what would be some examples? And I'll give you some resources in case this is interesting to you. And again, if this is your doorway that resonates, where to go for more information. So I mentioned Kelly Turner's book. I think that's a really good one. And that, and she also shared some stories, not just about personal spiritual paths and journeys, but also receiving healing from spiritual healers as being one of those paths too. Meditation can also be a doorway into this path of spiritual awakening. Dr. Joe Dispenza's work is very interesting around healing and meditation. And he's done incredible research around the actual physiological changes that happens when people are in, particularly in deep meditative states, including healing of cancer cells. So meditation could be one of the ways you would do this doorway, right? Like one of the ways you would practice or put it into place. There's also been some incredible stories around near-death experiences as being this, again, this like path towards their spiritual awakening. Another beautiful book, if you haven't read it already, is Anita Morjani's book, Dying to Be Me. Beautiful and like profound message around just being so intentionally mindful around who you are, your soul's path, who you're meant to be, not playing small, not shying away, not making yourself fit into boxes at the expense of your own health. Yeah. So definitely read that book if you haven't yet. I mentioned actually in the emotional part. I think it goes between these two doorways, but like past, like inherited family traumas, even past life, if you believe in that, like past life karmic traumas, like things that we carry into this soul's experience that could be in our cellular memory. There's another really good book. I'm just looking over here in case you're watching the video, because I have some of these books next to me. Mark Wolin's book, It Didn't Start With You, is a really good one about inherited family trauma and understanding how what happened to your parents, to your grandparents in particular, maybe even further back, but I'd say most of the research is kind of that parents and grandparents is still impacting your health, your cells, your DNA. It's fascinating. So that could be like something to explore. I would also say, just in general, and something that might be a little bit more to do as a starting point, particularly if you don't, if you don't already feel like you have a spiritual path that you've been following, whether that's, and for you guys to know too, that when I say spiritual, it could, it can include religion, 100%, particularly if that's your inclination. And it doesn't have to. It is, I spoke about this in a lot more depth in my Substack community. So if you're curious about all the nuances of what I mean here, I would encourage you to go listen to that video. Okay. But connection just honestly into something greater than you. And you can call it whatever you want that to be. It can be God, it can be the universe, right? It can be spirit, source, goddess, whatever, whatever resonates. But it's just like this concept of something beyond you. And you might find that in deep prayer or meditation. You might find that on a spiritual retreat, right? Camping in the wilderness, like I just talked about. Or gosh, you even I'm just kiggling because I have felt this myself, but like even after just a great yoga class, you might feel that, right? Or just being out in the middle of nature, you might feel that. It's just this concept of like there is something more than me, and I am connected to it. And it's interesting because there is a lot of benefit to that, of just like finding peace and calm and again, awe and wonder in all the parts that we just maybe can't even explain or understand. So I want to explain a little bit about the benefits that we know of, and then just to write, keep it open to the concept that there's probably many more benefits that we just don't have tools to research or study. So I would say some of the physical benefits, especially they've done quite a bit of research around meditation and physical benefits, like a lot of Dr. Joe Dispens's work. But the physical benefits, certainly, when it comes to health and cancer prevention in particular, is immune function. Like we can measure the change in the blood. We can measure the change in the activity of immune cells after well during and after meditation. So just that alone can be positive, right? That can be very helpful. They've also shown epigenetic changes. So again, how your genes express themselves can be shifted by meditation, by I would say, in general, having a spiritual path, having some of these experiences that we've that we just I just mentioned. When we think about vibrational frequency, okay, I talked about some of those positive emotions that raise your energetic frequency. Well, connecting to God, connecting to spirit, connecting to the universe, this like this concept of divine, like love, right? That just is a non-judgmental, infinite love or bliss, or yeah, or just that connection to something bigger than you is probably the highest vibrational frequency of all. And honestly, I don't have proof of this, but just like thinking about it conceptually, it could also explain why spiritual healers can do what they do, because they basically can channel this super high vibrational energy or frequency and then share it with others, right? So even if like you can't access it yourself, you can be with somebody who could access that. I would also say, in general, when they interview people who have had some of these radical remission stories, especially around the spiritual peace, a spiritual journey or spiritual enlightenment, it also expands into just providing a bigger sense of purpose, right? Of a meaning to life that provides more peace and calm in their bodies, which is not only raising the vibration, but is also calming the nervous system, right? So you can think about how this is working both on the physical and the energetic. So we're raising or improving coherence in our cells, our tissue, our fascia, all the things by calming the nervous system and raising our energetic vibration. So truthfully, anything that does that for you, I'm trying to bring words to it, but really anything that does that for you will work. It's what we're talking about. One other thing I would say here too, particularly if you have a strong connection to God or to higher like divine presence, is being able to truly, like 100% truly let go of the worry, let go of the fear, let go of the outcome of this journey and just be in it, right? Like just day to day and letting God take over, just giving it over to the divine, right? That frees up a lot of energetic and emotional space in the body and can invite in more healing, right? So I hope that all makes sense. And you see that there's a lot of through lines, right, when it comes to coherence and energy, and these are all just different ways that we can access it. So, like I said in the episode a couple weeks ago, whether you start with the body or the mind or spirit, all of these doorways are going to impact your energy, right? They're going to help improve your cellular coherence, they're going to help improve physiological function, they're going to help enhance your healing. So

Choosing Your Starting Doorway

SPEAKER_00 31:40

the goal was to show you that there's not just one way to do it. There's a lot of ways to do it. And what is most important is to start with whichever one calls to you the most and then go from there and see what other doors open as you move down this journey.

Substack And Healing Accelerator Invite

SPEAKER_00 32:00

And as I mentioned before, I talk a lot more about how to get started with these doorways inside of our Substack community. So that could be a great next step if you want to continue to go deeper and to learn more and to come on this journey with me and my team. And if you're ready for like full support, full deep dive into how to do this, then the invitation is still there for you to join us inside of our coaching container, the Healing Accelerator. And this is a 12-month program where we guide you through each of these pieces in a lot more and practicality, right? And support to make it doable. And also personalize it for wherever you are in your journey. We can hop on a free call and chat more if that interests you. I would certainly love to welcome you into our community and help support your healing if what I'm sharing is resonating. And if you're still here, then I'm guessing it probably does. All right. Next

Next Guest And Closing Requests

SPEAKER_00 33:06

week we have one more episode before we're going to take our little summer break and hopefully spend a lot of time outside of nature. Next week, I have a very special guest. His name is Alejandro Salomone. He is a spiritual guide and he works on helping people blend a lot of what we talked about in this doorway number six. So helping to blend energy healing with consciousness exploration, with deep personal transformation to ultimately help align with your highest self, right? With your soul's purpose in this lifetime. And this is going to piggyback really well on the last doorway I just talked about, in giving you more context and tools of how to get started on that path. So if that doorway resonated for you, then you definitely want to tune into next week's episode. All right. Beautiful souls, thank you so much for being here and going on this journey with me. Please help spread the word. If you love what we're doing here, share and subscribe and leave a review so we can get into the ears of more people. I am always so appreciative of that. Reach out if you'd like to work with us more closely. I would love to meet you and be able to support you on this journey. And I wish you such a beautiful day. I look forward to connecting with you again on next week's episode. Bye for now.