Confession of a Holistic Wellness Practitioner

It was around midnight on 30^th December 2025. I was lying in bed next to my husband and daughter in an Airbnb in Japan, a country I’ve always dreamed of visiting. We were spending our year end vacation there with my sister and her family whom I’ve not seen for 3 years. “I should be enjoying myself. I should be feeling happy.”  Those were the thoughts going through my brain. But I wasn’t. Instead, I was the most dysregulated I’ve ever been in a long time. And my heart was aching. Not just figuratively, but literally. I was feeling pain in my chest, struggling to breathe.

“Is this heartburn from what I ate earlier? Or something more serious? What if I’m having a heart attack?” For someone with a long family history of heart disease, this is not a random thought nor a dramatic one. But a fear that has always been in the back of my mind since my father died after suffering a stroke when he was only in his late fifties.

What if I die here tonight?” was the thought that came next as I sat there, trying to regulate my system, calming my body, one breath at a time. The thought of dying in that moment didn’t really scare me (this may sound a little morbid for some). A part of me felt contented, knowing that I have been living my life from my heart, in the best way I know how, over the last few years. Knowing that I’d be remembered for who I truly am, at least by those close to me, gave me a sense of peace. But then I thought about my husband, my daughter, my sister and her family. I imagined them having to find me dead in the morning, in a foreign country, and how traumatic that would be for them. I thought of my daughter, and the years of therapy she would need to heal from that. I didn’t want to leave them that way. So, I continued breathing through the pain and said a little prayer “not today, please”.

That wasn’t the first time I felt the pain. I remember feeling it when I was in my thirties. I just chalked it up as stress given the way I was living (or more just surviving) then. It stopped after I changed the way I was eating and living, doing everything I deemed was ‘right’…until last year. That’s when it came back again. More than once.  

At first I brushed it off, just like I did the first time. “It must be the stress of parenting and starting a business.” Then it happened again, a few more times. In my heart I knew something wasn’t right. But even though I ‘ought to’ know better, I ignored the signs. My instincts told me it was time to get my health checked (the last time I did was 2023). But I kept pushing it – “when I have time, it cost too much, the next appointment is too far along, I’ll wait ‘til there’s a promotion for the functional testing”…yada yada yada, the list of excuses goes on. I’ve heard the same from my clients, friends and families. There is always something else that is taking priority.

But once I came back from Japan, I decided it was time to listen to what my body was trying to tell me and scheduled my lab tests. Part of me suspected that the tests would confirm what I already knew – the possibility of autoimmune disease, which already started in the form of psoriasis. I was hoping it didn’t get any worse, given all the work I’ve done over the past few years to heal my body. But what I found out shocked me. As someone who’s been doing all the ‘right’ things to support my health and well-being, I never thought I would see such results.

My cholesterol levels were elevated to a level I’ve never seen before. I was deficient in several other nutrients that I never thought I would be. My immediate reaction was to blame myself. For all the things I ought to do but didn’t do. For the ways I’ve been slacking on self-care since I started focusing on getting my business running. For all the choices I made that weren’t supportive of my health. “I should know better as someone doing this for a living”.

Guilt and shame can be really powerful. The first week after I got my results back I felt lost and a little helpless. Imagining the worst case scenario. Then quickly followed by the need to find answers, solutions to fix my issues. From researching for medical advice to supplements and tools. These were all familiar ways I’ve learned to adapt to stressful situations in the past.

But this time I noticed them - my adaptive responses, my dysregulation, my self-blaming. And I acknowledged them, all these parts trying to help me ‘put out the fire’. It took me another week or so, but I eventually found a way to befriend them. And they stop having the same hold on me. I slowly came out of being pulled between feeling helpless and frantically finding solutions. And things began to make sense. I started understanding what my body was going through, and answers slowly found their way to shape the choices I have to care for myself moving forward.

This is what I’ve learned in the process:

1. It’s never just about one thing, the importance of a holistic perspective – I’ve always thought that as long as I continue to do what I’ve been doing with a supportive diet and lifestyle, it would be enough to keep myself healthy. To a certain extent it is true, but it’s also incomplete. Because our well-being is all encompassing, and not just physical. It’s also mental, emotional, social and spiritual. When I first started making changes to my diet and lifestyle, I was focusing only on physical health. Then when I started focusing on my emotional health over the last few years, I focused my attention mostly on that, and less on making sure I was nourishing myself in other ways. Whether it was staying on top of my check-ups, taking the time to prepare (and enjoy) nutritious meals, regular supplementations where necessary, and taking the time to rest and restore. Somewhere along the way, I lost track of the other parts that matter, and my body tried to show me in many gentler ways before it had to speak louder with the pain. This was a reminder for me to practice what I preach – to care for myself, holistically. It also made me realize how easy it is to fall into the trap of focusing on one aspect of well-being at the expense of another, without noticing.

   
   

2. Listening from a place of love and care, even when it’s not what I want to hear – I believe that as long as I’m caring for my body from a place of love, I would know what my body needs. That is true but it requires me to truly listen and not only when it’s convenient or when it feels good. I ignored my body’s cry the first few times because I had other priorities in mind. Also, because I didn’t like what I was hearing. That’s how I’ve abandoned myself in the past, and how I’ve crossed the boundary with my body. This experience serves as another opportunity for me to remember that self-care isn’t about doing things when it is convenient, but a steady, consistent act of love, trust and respect for myself, no matter what. The ultimate act of self-love is not abandoning myself again.  

   
   

3. My body is adapting to different seasons of life, and no one needs to take the blame -  It was so easy to start blaming and shaming myself in all the ways that I felt like I’ve failed (I suspect this is the case for many others too). That did nothing to help but took the power away from me to act. Once I was able to acknowledge that and allow them to move through, I was able to approach my issues in more helpful ways. I learned that some of the symptoms were the result of my body going through perimenopause. And I was not alone in that experience. Along the way, I found support from others to help me explore ways to navigate this season in my life. It also made me realize how conditioned we have become to put the blame and shame on ourselves, especially for us women, when we are dealing with the most natural seasons of our lives be it puberty, pregnancy, peri- or menopause. While it may have been that way in the past when the previous generations were under-resourced, we have the ability to now choose to resource ourselves and change the narrative, for ourselves and the generations to come.