 As someone who once spent more than 10 years sick, I can tell you that most of what you know about healing is wrong. Now, who ends up doing the healing? Is it the physician, the person with all the prescription pads and the white coat and the medications in this little white pill? Is it the surgeon who removes the gallbladder that's gone bad? Or who does some kind of intestinal surgery because of some inflammation or some infection you have? Or is it the dietitian that gives you a little change in your diet and then the healing comes? Who actually does the healing? In this video, I thought I would share a very personal look at a bit of my own healing journey and share five of the lessons I learned being someone who was formerly sick for about 10 years. Hi guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hain, board licensed acupuncturist and doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine and author of The Health Book, Master the Day. So let's jump in. Healing lesson number one, your illness is a gift. If you see it that way. One of my first mentors used to say to me, Alex, your illness and your symptoms are a gift. And frankly, it used to really piss me off because I had spent so much money and so much time and so much journaling, introspection, trying to understand that it was not a gift. It was painful and I was losing money and time that I could have for my whole life going to illness and healing. And he said, listen, every little thing that you go through, if you view it through the lens of that silver lining, there is something to learn. And that thing that you have to learn maybe there's a way that you think about life. Maybe you feel like there's not enough time or you have to be driven because being driven means you're gonna be successful. And successful is how you feel like you're a real valuable person in the world because your mom was like that or your mom pushed you. And so this root of I don't feel good enough pushes you to do something else that then sows the seeds of illness. Or maybe you realize you're really unhappy at your job and that's been the root of this sort of emotional eating going out and getting drinks after work every night that put on 30 pounds and cause that acid reflux. So what he was saying was that your illness and your symptoms are a gift because they are messengers trying to show you where you've gone astray in your life. Healing lesson number two, the body does not lie. You know, one particular day during my healing journey I was feeling particularly self-loathing or maybe just depressed because again, I was putting in all this time and money. My ego views myself as quite an intelligent person and someone who lives an overall healthy life but to be having all these symptoms felt like something was not right. It felt like there was a mismatch that I didn't deserve a dangerous word to have these symptoms. I eat healthy every day. I work out four days a week. I like my work. How could I be so sick was the thought that came through my mind? And I also thought, I feel like I'm really smart. Why can't I figure this out? And it was amazing this cognitive dissonance that was happening with me psychologically that I see with so many of my patients and usually the smarter they are or the more driven they are, the more that this is true. The body all day long was showing me signs and symptoms of in my case extreme stress, heart palpitations every day, insomnia almost every single day, acid reflux, indigestion. My body was showing me, my body's in panic, five alarm fire as my mentor said and yet I couldn't recognize that because my mind, mentally, I was like, I don't feel that stressed but my body was showing the different story, the real story. And so that's why I say to my patients, the body does not lie because while you may be thinking that you're fine, the body tells the true story because the body is not only in some ways the subconscious mind, the body is the receptacle of the damage of the nervous system, of all of the various rituals and habits, good or bad that you do, one of the ways they primarily manifest is in the body. So if you mentally think you're fine but your body is showing all kinds of signs and symptoms of dysfunctional disease, you might wanna check in there because there's a giant disconnect happening. Healing lesson number three, the canaries are always singing. You guys know this whole canary in the coal mine analogy or metaphor, right? That apparently these coal miners back in the day would bring canaries into the mines and if carbon monoxide was there the canaries would start singing and would die potentially if it was too much. So that was a signal to the miners they had to get out pronto. So there are these very, very subtle signs in the body that are trying to tell you that you're moving on the road to disease. That may be just a little bit of indigestion from time to time or it may be a full blown tumor growing off the side of your neck. But in general, the canaries are always there. Are you paying attention? A lot of the time we're too busy, we're driven by the mind, I need to succeed, I need to provide, I need to do this, I need to get things done because insert reason. But the canaries are always telling you to slow down and stop and listen. I'll never forget, as soon as I started feeling better in my healing journey the first let's say like week or two where I had normal energy and I didn't feel like I was chronically fatigued or I wasn't having heart palpitations or an arrhythmia, finally got back in the gym. I finally started staying out late a little bit. I got drinks with my friends and stayed out till two or three a.m. And within about a week those symptoms came crashing back full force. And it went to show that when people go through really serious long-term health crises, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, cancer, you have to be extremely careful with your resources for literally years after prioritizing rest and good nutrition and not pushing in your life. You have to prioritize that because you can easily backslide. But when I say that canaries are always singing the balance is always this very delicate scale that just starts with 1% indigestion once and then it's indigestion a few times a week and then it's full-blown GERD, acid reflux daily and then it's potential risk of increased esophageal cancer or Barrett's esophagus, let's say. That little balance starts always the same way with just 1% before it becomes quite serious. Healing lesson number four, when you are your weakest look for your trusted advisors or mentors. You know, it is in these stages where if you are seriously ill or even sometimes if you're not, if you've spent $300 in supplements and it hasn't done anything, pay a specialist $300 who actually knows what they're talking about because while it seems like a lot of money, it isn't in terms of continuing to use supplements that don't most of the time do anything. When you are really seriously ill, this is the time to look for trusted advisors, people who are sort of these guides on this healing quest, this healing journey because sometimes when you're really seriously ill, that can be the difference between having faith that this could work and giving up. I'll never forget driving up to one of my mentor's homes. He lived about an hour outside of a city and it was this beautiful winding country drive up into the forest, up into the hills, up into these very moss and lichen covered trees. Going through this hour drive out of the city, up into this really, really rural farm unmarked even. It felt like I was a person on the Camino de Santiago or doing a hage or some Christian going to, let's say Fatima in Portugal. I really felt like I was on this quest to meet my healer and something about that when you're incredibly scared, if you're very, very ill, can give you so much hope and faith that that placebo on its own can be something that keeps you going for another day. For a lot of the patients that come to see me for cancer, they tell me that weekly visit is something that gives them a lot of hope and a lot of faith. Regardless of any healing that is happening with me, with our oncologist, or even if sometimes they come in and they are terminal, that ritual gives them purpose and gives them hope and that inner fortitude it provides is a powerful healing force for me. Healing lesson number five, there are some initial signs of imbalance that you should pay attention to the most. So within traditional Chinese medicine, we say, there's a balance between yin and yang. And these are both theoretical concepts as well as practical ones. Work and rest, yang and yin. If you alter that balance too much, your 80% of your day is all work, 20% percent's rest, you're working 14 hours a day and you're work sleeping five, you will 100% of the time develop health problems. Maybe anxiety, maybe depression, maybe GI shoes, maybe you'll have a heart attack or stroke, 100% of the time something will happen with enough time. But day to day, it's important to pay attention to the subtle signs first. And in my mind, the first signs of the balance going in the wrong direction are nervous system signs and symptoms, like mood, you're noticing yourself feeling really agitated a lot. You're noticing yourself feeling really sad a lot or depressed a lot. Those are subtle signs that the macro balance of your life is not in a way that is producing health, it is producing disease. And only you know what that is and only you know where that's coming from. You may have to introspect, but that is the first sign. The second one being sleep. Because in traditional Chinese medicine, we say, sleep is often a mirror of the emperor, the heart, like the big spirit. And in cultures all around the world, the heart is associated with happiness or depression. So keeping the heart happy and paying attention to internally, how am I feeling and how am I actually doing? Now there are many other healing rituals and practices that you can do to heal. I've put together four of them. In a free guide, it's the first link below this video. Four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. That's a free download. And there's also information below this video on if you wanna book a visit with me in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can see my clinic info. And a brand new excitement that's really cool. We just launched something called the Healing Library, which is a series of online programs on how you can heal with traditional Chinese medicine. I launched this to develop more specialized information for you, as well as to keep this channel sponsor-free. There's no shortage of wellness and doctors that are throwing supplements and throwing all kinds of things that realistically probably don't do anything. I know you've bought them, my patients tell me. And I figured, what could I do to keep this channel sponsor-free? Launch online programs to learn about healing with purely traditional Chinese medicine. So the Healing Library, there's a link right below this video to learn more about it. And you can check out if some of those courses connect with you. But before you guys go, there's one more related video right here on my healing journey that I think can help.