E061 | How to heal with both strategy and soul (yes, you need both)

What if healing was never about picking a side?

 You’ve been told to choose between science and intuition. But what if that very choice is what's keeping you stuck in a cycle of symptoms, frustration, and flare-ups?

So, what if the real problem isn't your symptoms themselves, but the fragmented approach to healing?
 In this episode, I share why so many women are stuck in chronic symptoms—not because they're doing it wrong—but because they've been taught to heal in pieces. I also talk about my personal journey of discovering that true healing comes not from fixing your body, but from reconnecting with it.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• Why healing requires integrating both science and soul
• The real cost of ignoring your inner world
• A simple activity that can start shifting you from survival mode to healing mode

You don’t need another protocol. You need a pathway that brings you back home to yourself.

 That’s exactly what I guide you through in the Body Wise Reset™.

Ready to stop chasing symptoms and finally understand what your body’s trying to tell you?

Join my free Decode Your Symptoms Deep Dive on May 29 

We’ll walk through my 3-step Symptom Decoder that helps women turn flares into clarity—and overwhelm into action.

 👉 Save your seat now – it’s free and LIVE!

OTHER LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Join our free Facebook group: Embrace Your Healing Journey
• Book “What we ache for” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
• Learn about the "BODY WISE HEALING" FRAMEWORK

Write to me at anindita@aninditarungta.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Chapters

• 1:28 Personal Journey into Medicine
• 3:00 Balancing Masculine and Feminine Energies
• 5:09 Exploring Creativity and Spirituality
• 7:08 Recognising the Inner Ache
• 8:47 Redefining Healing Beyond Symptom reversal
• 10:24 The Dangers of Fragmented Healing
• 12:37 Integration as the Key to Healing
• 14:37 Building a Supportive Healing Rhythm
• 16:02 Transitioning from Survival to Healing
• 17:00 The Pathway Back to Self
• 17:21 Invitation to the Body Wise Reset
• 17:49 Key Takeaways and Wrap Up

Transcript

You've been told healing is about making a choice. A choice between science or self-trust. Labs. Or intuition? But what if that choice is exactly what's keeping you stuck in a cycle of symptom, frustration and flares? So what if healing was never about choosing a side, but about coming home to all of you? So you've tried the protocol supplement diets, mindset work. Maybe you've even tried yoga, journaling, meditation, uh, it comes, but healing that class doesn't come from choosing either this or that. It comes from learning to hold both. 

And in this episode, I share why so many women stay stuck in a cycle of chronic symptoms not because they're doing it wrong, but because they have been taught to heal in pieces. And you will hear my story in this. You will hear the cost of ignoring our inner world and what it really takes to rebuild your health, and not just based on your labs. If you've done everything right and still don't feel better. This episode is for you. Let's explore. When what happens when strategy meets soul? Welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women with autoimmune and other chronic conditions to help them navigate their illness without fear of isolation and uncertainty, and find relief from their symptoms. Your body is your guide and ally in healing. If you are ready to embrace this journey with compassion and awareness, then this show is for you. Tune in weekly as I am a Functional medicine Certified Health Coach, deliver tips and insights that demystify the healing process, guiding you towards the relief you deserve so that you can feel healthy and happy once more. So I wanted to become a doctor when I grew up. Partly the reason was that my father died of cancer when I was 12, and I wanted to be a part of medicine that would actually find a cure for cancer. And partly, I believe, that conventional medicine was the only way to manage illness or prevent a disease, and that it was our only chance. But I didn't get through to medical college, so I did the next best thing I could. I majored in physics instead, and that was my undergraduate program, which is basically called Graduation in India. And for a really long time, coming from this background of science, which I've done right from school till college, I believe that was the only way to deal with ill health, to get answers for difficult questions or pretty much anything else in our lives. And yes, that's true, that science is able to give us answers for many things in our life. It provides solutions. It provides life saving medicines. And but I also believe that everything had to be based on science or logic or nothing else. Uh, and in other words, my entire focus was only on strategy, productivity and efficiency. And all these factors, unfortunately, lie outside of us. I was completely unaware of the rich inner world that each one of us possess, and the power that it holds to transform each and every one of us. So for a long time, when I was working in the corporate world and I worked in banking and financial services for ten long years, I remained disconnected from this intuitive, feminine side of myself. I was, uh, you know, unaware of that. There was this power that we women have deep inside of ourselves that we are born with. And it is also there in each and every one of us, irrespective of our gender, because we each have a masculine and feminine side to us. And in order to succeed in this patriarchal world, I played by those rules. Uh, anything that was considered woowoo or feminine was unacceptable to me. Fast forward to today. Now, I believe, and I know that each one of us, as I mentioned, irrespective of gender, have a feminine and masculine side to us and we need a balance of both. We need a balance of both to be happy, to be in harmony and to really thrive. But just like me, many women are taught to either disregard or suppress their femininity. Uh, in just. And this is just so that we can, uh, you know. We can succeed in other peoples on other people's terms, we can fit in. We are. We don't want to be seen as weak. There are many good reasons why we do this, and we end up paying a huge price for this. I mean this as women or women's health. This is one big thing. By ignoring our body's internal messages in our guidance system, we pay a huge toll over the years. It doesn't show up in our 20s or 30s, but by the time our 40s come, you know, it starts showing up. And this is not only in terms of physical health, but it's also emotional mental health as well. And we, you know, and the other thing that I've realized is as we grow older, we have an ache deep within us for something that seems to be missing from our lives. Like we realized finally, because maybe we've sort of slowed down from, you know, running all the time, maybe because, you know, in your 20s and 30s, we are building a career. We are managing young kids for those who those who choose to have children. Career takes a big part if you are working. But even apart from that, if you are at home, you're taking care of the house. Then we have our parents, then we have our in-laws. So there is a huge, huge amount of responsibility that each woman has and there's no time to pause down, to listen, to be with ourselves. And but there comes a time and you know, you can't escape this. And it's usually in our 40s that we start feeling that something is really missing and we don't know what that is, and we don't know why we have this ache. And in order to explain this further, I want to share an excerpt from the beautiful, soulful book What We Ache For by a mountain dreamer that explains this so eloquently. She talks about creativity. She talks about spirituality and sexuality, sexuality, and why all these three are so important to lead a wholesome life. And I'm going to just read this part for you. Our stories and images and sounds create, explicate or point to a deeper meaning that helps us receive, celebrate and be fed by beauty and bear what is hard. And if the meaning revealed by the process of creating is often more implicit than explicit. Still, it does not fail to feed us, because what it feeds is not our minds, but our souls and souls do not need explanations. They need only to touch and sit in the center of the meaning that is enfolded in being. This is the root of the creative work we do, the desire to intimately touch and share the truth of our lives and our world, to find and follow the sometimes hidden thread, stitching ourselves and our reality into wholeness. This wholeness is what we eat for the home we fear we have lost and to which we long to return. And I think each and every one of us reaches a point in our lives where we are looking for this wholeness, this home that we had access to so easily when we were very young children. But we are conditioned literally out of it by the time we are in a school, primary school, even in primary school, and definitely by the time we are adults, we are more or less out, completely out of touch with this, this part of ourselves. So you might be feeling like something's missing, but you can't quite name it. You go through the motions, you show up for your family, for your life, and maybe you even excel at it. You may have a very successful career, a work, you know, life, but inside there's an ache, there's some. There's an emptiness, a heaviness you can't quite shake that never seems to go away. And you are tired. But it's not just in your body, but also in your mind. You're tired of second guessing yourself, of doubting yourself. You're tired of holding it all together. And deep down you feel like you're falling apart. So you might find yourself snapping at people you love, and then you feel guilty for it, and you might even cry unexpectedly. Or not at all, because you've gone numb and you lie awake at night wondering what's wrong with you. You know you've lost touch with who you once were. The one who felt light. The one who was curious. The one who was free. The one who was playful. And there's a part of you that aches to come home to her. You know, I know that ache. I have lived with it like many other women. This is a part that I had lost touch completely for a very long time, till a major crisis in my family shook the very foundation of my being, and I was forced to look within, just to survive, just to find a way to live through those dark times. And I've talked about it in many other episodes in episode one where I talked about my daughter's health issues and this, this reconnecting with that part of myself was what helped me pull through those times, be there for my family and help get my daughter's health under control, and I became a coach health coach in the process. And I'm here for you today because I know the pain. Uh, you know that, uh, you know, that many people go through when they are in that dark place. And that's why this episode matters. Because I realized long time ago, and you might realize it now after this episode, that healing is not just about your symptoms. It's about remembering who you are and making space for all of you. Because the real problem is not your inflammation. It's not just your hormones. It's not an imbalance or sluggish thyroid. Even though all of them are very important and they definitely need to be addressed. The deeper problem is that you've been taught to ignore your body screens, uh, before they become, uh, bodies whispers till they become scream. So you keep ignoring, you keep suppressing. You override your needs in the name of productivity. You numb your intuition because it does not fit into your protocol or treatment. Let me give you an example. Like when you want to go to the bathroom. Because we women are so used to holding onto our pee, you know, and not going to the bathroom when we are traveling. We tend to do that even when we have access to a clean, clean toilet, right when we are working. And I've done it so many times that I can, you know, I can fail, count to fail, fail to count those times, uh, on numerous occasions, even after knowing this, I tend to do that at times. But this is just one way that we are suppressing what our body actually needs at that time, right? It's a very small thing, but it, you know, it's it's just a symptom of what we do, uh, the way we suppress our body's needs. So typically we end up chasing external solutions instead of pausing long enough to ask, what does my body need right now? What is it trying to tell me? Because you've been conditioned to believe that healing is all about doing. Fixing your body, fixing your diet, fixing your gut, fixing your life. But when you only focus on fixing, you miss the deeper listening. And without that listening, true healing can't happen. It cannot be sustainable and your symptoms just keep returning. And I call this a disease merry go round because so many of us. That's true. You're on this merry go round and you're just going round and round in circles. You're never, never really able to get off it because your symptoms keep coming back. And it's not because you're broken or your body is broken, because your body is trying to protect you. It's trying to get your attention because the actual problem has not really been addressed, and it's been carrying the weight of your silence, your stress, and your unprocessed pain or even trauma. If you've faced any, uh, you know, uh, childhood issues, etc. like for me, I know that my body definitely has, uh, you know, some amount of grief that it holds on because of losing a parent so early in life. I mean, this is the work that, you know, I've been doing, uh, because of my own profession. It helps me to understand what's going on with me as well, to some extent. And it's good, I know I realize that it's going to be a lifelong. Endeavor, a lifelong practice to process that grief. And, you know, it's a gap that can never really be, uh, completely, uh, filled. And that's okay. I mean, I'm learning. I've learned over the years how to live with it. I am able to express and talk about it, and hopefully I'm able to share some of these things with you. And it proves to be medicine for you because your body, again, is trying to get your attention, and it's not trying to punish you, but to wake you up. So you need to know how to listen to your body's language because you've already tried everything they've told you to. You've cleaned up your diet, maybe have gone off gluten, dairy, nightshades. You've taken the supplements. You've done the journaling, the meditation, the mindfulness practices, the yoga, and you've done the work. And if yet something still feels off, then you know that there is something that you are missing, and it's often because you are only ever handed fragments. These fragments of advice, fragments of healing, fragments of your own story. You are not taught to treat your body like a, uh, you know, like. Like it's already holy. You were taught to treat your body like it's, you know, it has to be a machine which has to be fixed rather than a messenger that needs to be understood. And most importantly, you were taught to pick a side. Either it's science or soul. Either is lab tests or intuition or structure or softness. But true healing will never ask you to pick a side. It asks you to come home to yourself. So when all those well-intentioned strategies did not give you the lasting relief that you were seeking, you thought you were the problem. But you are not. What hasn't worked for you? It's you know, it's because of the fragmented pieces of advice and the fragmented way that you've been taught to heal. And the answer, the solution is integration. That is what works. You stop outsourcing your healing and you start reclaiming your inner knowing because it's already there. It's already there within you. Your body knows how to heal. It just needs your support. And when you start doing this, Things start to shift in ways that you can't even predict. It's the same with, uh, with my daughter, with my own health issues when I've had. It's the same thing with my clients that when they start doing this inner work, things start to shift that go beyond their physical symptoms, because you need a new way to heal, one that honors your biology and your inner wisdom. And you need a framework that does just does not tell you what to do, but teaches you how to listen. Because only by listening can you learn how to decode your symptoms. And that is the language of your body. So you need a framework that guides you to create a protocol, not from a place of fear, but from a place of knowing, of understanding and of listening. And that's exactly what we do inside the body wise reset. It's it's based on the body wise healing framework, the methodology, because you learn how to ask better questions and you stop treating your body like your enemy, and you start building a rhythm that includes rest, nourishment, boundaries, and nervous systems. Put all the things that all the ingredients that your body actually needs to thrive. Because again, once again, and I've talked about this earlier in earlier episodes as well, healing is not about adding more to your plate. It comes from simplifying, and it comes from aligning your actions with what your body really needs from you. So tonight, let me just share one small activity that you can do with a small, powerful, immediate, uh, you know, effect that it can have on your life. So tonight, instead of scrolling through your phone before bedtime, put one hand on your heart and one on your belly and just pause and ask yourself this. What? Ask your body this question. What do you need from me right now? And when you pause and listen, your body will tell you. Sometimes it might be I am tired and I need to sleep now. I need a good cry, right? I'm sad for some reason. It's maybe a grief. It may be sadness that you did not really acknowledge. And sometimes I need less noise. So you need a bit of peace and quiet. Listen without judgment, without trying to fix anything. Write it down and do it again tomorrow night. Do it as many times as you need to. This is how you begin the shift from overwhelm to insight. That's where real healing begins. Because. On the on the other side, if you stay in survival mode, this is this is the mode that I am talking about. By doing this, activity will shift you from the fight or flight mode, which is a survival mode to the rest, and digest mode, which is the healing mode. But the longer you stay in survival mode, doing all the right things on paper, but your soul is quietly withering away, the harder it becomes to hear what your body is actually saying. And healing is not just about getting rid of symptoms. It's about coming back into relationship with yourself, your body. It's about knowing what to do when that flare hits. It's about having the tools that don't require perfection. They just need your presence. It's about building rhythms that feel nourishing and not and doesn't add more pressure. And it's about remembering that you are not too sensitive, too slow, too lazy, or too complicated. You are just somebody whose body has been trying to get her to listen. And you're finally ready now. So when you finally stop fighting yourself, your body, you can bring both strategy and soul to your healing. And it's not you know, it's not going to just show on your lab results. It's going to show in your life. That's the beauty of this kind of approach. So you don't need another protocol. You need a pathway which brings you back home to yourself. And that's exactly what I teach inside the body wise. Reset. So if this episode, you know, resonated with you, if you're ready to stop healing in fragments and start creating wholeness, then I invite you to join the waitlist for the Body Wise Reset Group program. It's where strategy meets soul. It's where you decode your symptoms. You simplify your healing and help you finally feel better without the overwhelm. So you get early access. Behind the scene updates, you can head to the com forward slash reset waitlist that's underneath.com/reset waitlist, or click on the link in the show notes to join the waitlist. And before we wrap up, here's the body wise wrap up for what we cover today. Number one. You've been told to choose between science and soul. But real healing happens when you integrate both. Number two, symptoms are not just physical. They're emotional and energetic. Two if your body is asking for a different kind of feeling and that is what it shows up in terms of your headache, the exhaustion, the sense of disconnection. Number three, you've tried the protocols, the diets and the mindfulness apps. But what is missing is often a framework that helps you to listen and act with clarity and compassion. Number four, you don't need more information. You need integration. A way to connect with your mind, body, and heart in your healing journey. And number five, you're not broken. Your body is wise when you start honoring your inner knowing and the sign what science can offer. That's when true healing happens and that you'll be amazed with the results that you can see.