Bruce L. Bair, Physician’s Assistant and Wellness Coach, interviewed me for his radio show, “Ask an Expert Anything.” This interview aired November 4th and I’ll publish excerpts of the transcript in several parts, edited for readability.
B: Bruce Bair M: Mari L. McCarthy
B: Now, you founded Create Write NOW and you have this program called “Journaling for the Health Of It ™” that we talked about a little bit last time. How does a listener or any potential client of yours make use of the program?
M: …It’s an opportunity for all of us to get into our inner life and understand what motivates us, what helps us, where we come from, all those types of things so that we can understand what's really going on inside of us. Get through all the baggage and craziness that we've been carrying around with us and get to our real, true, authentic healthy self that we came into this world with.
B: How have people used the program that you’ve worked with so far?
M: Well, I guess I'd like to give a personal example of how I use it. I was diagnosed, or shall I say I diagnosed myself, with shingles. I got myself to my doctor, and luckily there is a drug out there called Valtrex, so that was able to help me. I talked to my naturopathic doctor and she said basically that stress brings (shingles) on.
So what I decided to do was, of course, get to my journal, and what I did, for a period of about a week or so every single day, I had a dialogue with my shingles. I was able to then get into realizing all kinds of other physical behavior (that has) origins in mental and emotional things.
As I said earlier, we carry around so many erroneous messages, and we just need a vehicle, a way to identify those things and work through them.
I was going through a period where my business is really expanding and growing. I'm very active. A lot of good things are happening in my life, and I'm saying, "Well, now how would that bring out the shingles? And in the process of the dialoguing with the disease, I found that there were still a whole lot of messages that I was still carrying around with me; about ‘Maybe you shouldn't be this successful, you shouldn't be drawing attention to yourself,’ and things like that.
I thought, "Wow, that's really old stuff," because I was the oldest of four kids and basically I was mommy's helper and daddy's helper and just really being a good role model for my younger brothers and sisters.
(Journaling) enabled me to realize I was still carrying around a lot of issues, and helped me work through it, and I was done with the shingles inside of two weeks. And not only do I, from a stress point-of-view, really feel better, but because it certainly was very nice to get rid of all the pain and the agony of the shingles.
B: Well, they're very painful, and it's interesting that what you've brought up. I interviewed some people who have a cooperative of, I guess alternative medical healers, sort of like naturopathy and chiropractors. I interviewed a couple of women who work in energy healing, and they make the same contention that you do -- that if you have a physical symptom, you had an energy system problem for a long time before that manifested physically.
And they kind of contend the same thing that you have to clean up your energy. Different practitioners have different ways of doing that, and your way is to work on the energy in the brain and get thoughts, feelings, emotions, and underlying premises out on paper where you can see them and make them physical, so that's a very interesting way to approach that.
M: Yes, and I think that when things manifest themselves in the form of diseases, it's also an indication from your body that you're disconnected from your body. I think we're all so experienced in living in our heads and thinking things through, and all that type of thing, that I really believe that physical disease gives us an opportunity to see it's like a wake-up call from our body. "Hey, it's time to get back into your (body), spend some quality time with yourself, and take a look at some other areas of you.”
We have our own whole inner world that has just been sitting there for years, and years, and years, and it's just like, "Oh my goodness, I'm still thinking that."
One of the things that came up in my journaling around the shingles was (that) when you're a young, impressionable, human being with a developing immune system, you're sucking all that stuff in. And it really literally gets stuck, like you're saying, in our energy systems, ourselves, our body somehow.
And the great thing about it is, with the journaling as with the energy work and other holistic forms of medicine, is that it focuses back at how much power, strength, and everything we have. It's just really a question of turning our heads around and doing some things to improve our thought process and get us focused on us, and we can manage the process. And then by doing that, then we can use the appropriate healthcare resources to help us heal ourselves.
B: You know those are great concepts, really great concepts, and in my coaching I kind of teach clients the same thing. The power is in you. You're perfectly whole, but you may not be connected to the whole. You have to connect yourself to the whole, and then, you can be resourced. You may not have all the information that you need, but you're perfect and whole and don't need anything else to be that way other than just to connect. And this journaling is a way to begin to connect all those points together and pay attention to them.
Learn more about Journaling for theHealth of It ™ coaching.