For the majority of my life I tried to ‘fix’ myself. I invested time, money and energy in the next shiny self-help thing – whether affirmations, performing an early morning run, or having a set meditation ritual. For a time, this felt exciting and hopeful – relieving, even, that there was a quick solution to fixing my chronic burn-out, anxiety and stress – before I came crashing down, feeling disillusioned that the ‘three easy steps’ I’d been promised didn’t create the lasting change I longed for.
I dove into all things self-help for a decade – ironically, eventually burning myself out with all the step-by-step routines and my huge to-do list of ‘fixing’. Prescribed routines and step-by-steps can leave us feeling inadequate, disconnected, and stressed out that we’re failing even at ‘self-care’, when in fact, we just aren’t seeing what’s aligned for our unique souls.
Well-meaning though it has been, I have come to see that the industry was born from the perspective that we need to fix ourselves – or, at the very least, we have learnt to interact with it that way, having been taught that that’s how healing works by mainstream medical systems. The problem is that this mindset really only implies we are broken.
As the industry has grown in popularity, I believe the self-help world has gone on to reinforce societal ideas about what ‘healing’ truly means, with many people still attempting to find a quick fix for their perceived brokenness – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually – and outsourcing to third parties instead of attuning to their own wisdom.
Informing Wellness 3.0
In contrast, if we look at how our ancestors viewed healing, we see a different worldview – one which contrasts with the (very lucrative) wellness industry’s mindset, instead grounding itself in reconnecting people to their intuition and their soul’s wholeness.
There’s been a movement recently about ‘Wellness 3.0’, which aligns with ancient healing wisdom philosophies – those more in-tune with the lineage passed down by medicine men and women of the past. ‘Wellness 3.0’ is about how we all need different wellness routines, and about what works for us as individuals rather than following the masses.
The real medicine: healing our souls by loving ourselves
My point of view is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach because we are all unique. I believe we don’t need fixing’ and that the true route of healing isn’t quick – rather, it involves the messy journey of trusting our intuition. Having studied the science and art of universal healing laws, I discovered that practitioners of ancient medicine believed that real healing wasn’t about ‘fixing’, but rather about attuning to our soul’s inner wisdom to bring ourselves back to wholeness. That’s a radically different worldview, especially in a culture where we’ve been conditioned to believe that we are ‘unlovable’ and we go to a doctor for sticky plasters.
Homeopath James Tyler Kent famously said: ‘there is no cell or tissue so small that it does not keep its soul and life-force in it’. His philosophy (and principles of the healing technology I call ‘archetypal remedies’) was that if there is a physical expression of illness, it is because our soul and life force has been disrupted and suppressed. This supports the idea that true healing is about reclaiming soul alignment. I’ve witnessed this hypothesis as true for myself, as well as for hundreds of women I’ve guided.
Wellness 3.0 advocates that healing is about reclaiming our uniqueness, not about following a prescription that worked for others. It is about reconnecting to our wisdom, which calls for a different approach: one of reclaiming our self-healing power.
That doesn’t mean we write off tools we’ve used in the past – perhaps reiki, herbal work, aromatherapy, embodiment practices, magical ritual or manifestation – but rather that we are being called to deeper attunement of what’s aligned for us in each moment, without a schedule.
The power to self-heal with our inner apothecary
Wellness 3.0 means attuning to our intuition – and we can do this by working with our inner apothecary of archetypal remedies. Archetypal remedies offer energy medicines that incorporate personality profiling to help us rediscover our own healing wisdom, rather than blindly following external, one-size fits-all solutions.
Standing on ancient legs of wisdom bodies such as homeopathy, archetypal psychology and energy healing, archetypal remedies offer a self-illumination process to re-discover ourselves, gain deeper self-knowledge of unconscious patterning, bring love to our wounds and reclaim our soul’s wisdom.
By working with them, we look within to welcome home lost aspects of ourselves we have shamed, rejected, hidden or plastered over in our wounded attempts to fix our ‘brokenness’. Grounded in the principle of ‘like cures like’, remedies act as mirrors for aspects of our psyche, helping us begin to ask things like:
- What is it that actually makes us stressed and anxious? Do we feel we aren't ‘enough’ and so we hide in hypervigilance? Archetypal Silver – the ‘second-best’ metal – could help us illuminate this.
- What unconscious patterns do we have that cause us to burn out? Do we people-please, do we over-burden ourselves? Archetypal Fire – the flame that burns us down – could help us illuminate this.
- What is it that has us ashamed and disconnected from certain aspects of our souls? Have we learnt that being our authentic selves will see us rejected, which has us reject parts of ourselves in turn? Archetypal She-Wolf – the lone wolf – could help us illuminate this.
These are just examples – there are over 4000 archetypal remedies for self-discovery, and anything in the natural world can be a remedy. The point is that by getting to know our inner world on a deeper level, we begin to cultivate a continual dialogue with ourselves, which helps us to actively change some of our hidden, unconscious wounding patterns that have us reach a stressed, burnt out and disconnected state.
For example, if we illuminate that we are the ‘lone’ archetypal She-Wolf, shaming our true self, we can learn about what keeps us in that pattern, love ourselves in it, and begin to choose differently. Then, we can engage with a practice that helps us to attune to our intuition around who our authentic self really is. Maybe that becomes wandering in nature to ponder this, as a She-Wolf would, rather than the journalling you’ve been contorting yourself into!
We can harness our inner apothecary to know ourselves better, so we can follow what we need ourselves, rather than copy what the media or the self-help world tells us we need. This way of working encourages us into self-discovery of our own needs, helping us attune to our own power, inner wisdom, and truth – and to follow our passions, which is the true way to vitality.
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