EP069 | When Healing Feels Hard: The Effortless Shift That Works

Are you exhausted from chasing rigid protocols that still leave you flaring and fatigued?

You’re not alone—most plans are built around rules instead of your body’s natural rhythms, so they eventually fizzle out.

That frustration can spiral into believing your body is “too broken” to heal, but the truth is simpler: ask what would make you feel just 10 % better this week and watch momentum return.

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

• Rhythms over rules – how syncing with your body’s cycles beats perfection-based protocols every time.
• The 10 % Question – a quick journaling prompt that turns overwhelm into doable next steps.
• Your new job title: CEO of Your Health – why reclaiming the driver’s seat is the fastest route to lasting relief.

By the end of this episode you’ll ditch protocol perfectionism, reconnect with your body’s wisdom, and know exactly where to focus first for sustainable healing. 

OTHER LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Free Facebook community: Embrace Your Healing Journey
• Autoimmune Healing Toolkit: https://aninditarungta.myflodesk.com/healingtoolkit
• Blog & resources: https://healingfromwithin.substack.com/
• BODY-WISE HEALING™ Framework overview video
• Healing Roadmap Session: https://aninditarungta.mojo.page/healingroadmapplus

Write to me at anindita@aninditarungta.com—I’d love to hear your biggest “10 % shift”!

Transcript

If you ever felt like healing is a full time job, then you are not alone. And by now you would have probably tried many more protocols than you can count on your fingers. Hi, my name is Anindita and I am a functional medicine certified health coach and a practitioner and I help women with, um, autoimmune conditions, um, take charge of their own healing and reverse their symptoms using their own bodies wisdom and guidance. 

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, 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. And today, I'm talking about a topic where, you know, you know, we don't discuss often enough in terms of Why, even after trying so hard, are so many women still struggling in the, you know, specifically, why do so many healing plants face? And I have found over years of working with such women, and even my own personal experience is that so many of those plants were never really meant for you. It's not. But the message that we get from, uh, from mainstream media. And, you know, when we try this, when we try different things and we keep trying, it's not like we know it's not because of a lack of effort. We keep we keep trying. It's the message that we often get is that we are either not trying hard enough or if only we tried a little harder, or that our body is broken. That is the message that we often get. 

And I out of all these three, then last one, that our bodies are simply too broken and they need to be fixed, and sometime, maybe even too much broken to be really fixed is really, really destructive. And it keeps us stuck. It keeps us in despair, and often we don't reach out for the kind of support that we need. Or maybe we have reached out for support and we have tried multiple things and we are still not getting any better. So we give up. Right. And when you give up hope, what happens? You give up hope. You stop looking for a better solution. And that's something that I'm here to tell you in a series of live sessions. Um, you know that this is something that we need to talk about. We need to bring out in the open, because so many of us are getting more and more sick, even as technology is improving, even as medicine has improved by leaps and bounds, there's so many of us getting sicker by the day. The incidence of chronic illnesses are increasing, the incidence of autoimmunity is rising, and mostly women are the ones who actually are. 80% of the people who make up for autoimmune conditions are women. And maybe I'll discuss the reason why another session. But today I want to focus on the fact that it was never about you. It was never your body. It's just that the plan that you may be following, the protocol that you may be following was never really suited for your body. It really did not meet your body's requirements. So that's that's what I want to talk about. 

I want to talk about the reason that the most, uh, plants fail is because they focus so much on rules instead of rhythms. You know, it's it's really unfortunate that, uh, we forget that we are a part of nature. I have made that mistake several times in the past. I still might make that mistake sometimes that I forget that I am a part of nature, right? I am an animal after all. I'm not a plant for sure. I'm a mammal, which is part of the animal world. That means that I am a part of nature, and the more that I can live with the rhythms and the cycles of my body in alignment with nature, the healthier I will be. It is as simple as that may not be easy, but as simple as that. And that's that's what I mean by saying that. Focus on rhythms and not just on rules. So understand what your body's rhythms are, understanding how your body functions. What are the times of the day that it functions in a certain way, and then see if you can, you know, design your life around it. And also, the other thing that happens with most plans is that they are designed for perfection. They are not designed for your real life. It's about, uh, you know, doing it the right way. It's about making sure that you're following the protocol to the tee, whether it makes sense for your body or not. It's completely irrelevant. That's that's again, really unfortunate because so many times, just by taking 30, 40 supplements, just by doing one lap after another is not going to help you. Ah, it's not about getting more and more data. What's the you know, what's the sense of getting more and more data if you're not able to implement it in your life? And if that data is not going to really serve any purpose, you know, meaningful purpose I'm talking about. I'm not against laptops. I'm not against supplements. I'm certainly not against medications because I use, uh, you know, a certain things in my practice as well. And medications are life saving. 

 I am not somebody who is for or against anything because I've found that it's typically not black and white. Uh, we certainly need, you know, there are all these shades in between, and we certainly need all these things at certain points in time. And they can also go hand in hand. But what we need to understand is that, you know, we need to be able to figure out what is really, uh, you know, working for us, what is really important for our bodies requirements at this point in time. So this because the fact remains that your body cannot heal in this fight or flight mode in this warzone. 

And that's something that many of us are living in. The world is not always out there in another country fighting another country. Sometimes we are fighting a war with our own bodies. And I see that that is certainly the case with people with autoimmune conditions, specifically because we have been told for so long that, um, our immune systems are attacking our own tissues. Yes, technically they are. But that's not the only thing we need to also stop ourselves and ask ourselves, why is that happening? Right? Is it just a random or is it just a fluke? No it's not. It's our body's way of protecting us, of keeping us alive. And what we need to dig deeper and deeper is to. Why have we reached this stage? Because if we don't do that, we don't really understand what is the solution. And it's a long term solution I'm talking about. So your body cannot heal when it's in a war zone, just like the people out there, whether it's in, uh, Gaza, whether it's in any part of the world, whether it's in Ukraine or Russia. They can't heal when they're in a war zone. 

 Whether it's mental, physical or emotional, it doesn't matter. You cannot simply get better when you're in a war zone. And I'm talking about the internal war zone that many of us are dealing with every single day. It doesn't matter. You know, the sad part is, we are so disconnected from our body that when I often ask my clients that, you know, what kind of stress are you facing? How are you feeling in your body?

 They have no idea. Or they are in denial because they have not connected with their bodies in a very long time, so they don't really know how they feel in their body. They don't really know that they're in a war zone. And the way I put it across is that it's not what you think, it's what your body believes to be true. And if you are constantly in distress in this fight or flight mode, you're constantly worrying, you're constantly anxious, you're constantly thinking, you know, negative. You know, your thought pattern is completely negative. What happens is that your body, beliefs and immune system believes that the tiger chasing you, and if a tiger is chasing you, it will prioritize survival over everything else. That is actually quite natural, and that's what your immune system has been designed to do. However, unfortunately, there is no real tiger chasing you. Most likely so if that is the case, but your immune system continues to ramp up its security system, its response in an aggressive manner and often at times it gets dysregulated. It does not happen overnight. None of these things happen overnight. It's not as if your body is not delicate. So it's not as if that, you know, a few days of stress here and there, a few sleepless nights, even a few months are going to have a problem. It is. It happens over months, and it actually happens over years and decades. That's how long it takes for a disease to develop. 

So when my when I work with clients, when they come to work with me for the first time and we go through the history, I actually link it back to their either their childhood or say a few decades ago or two decades ago or five years ago or even ten years ago.  It started at that time. That is the kind of disease progression that usually takes place. So your responsibility is to find out when that started happening. Because once you are able to connect those dots, you're able to take the measures to prevent them from becoming worse in the future. So the thing now, so now that you know and understand this, what can you do? Uh, I find that the solution is often the the most effective solution is often the most simplest one, because that is the one that, you know, we can actually implement and we don't really need to complicate things. Really. So one thing that I ask often in my roadmap session, roadmap session is a one session that I do. Uh, it's it's like saying that healing is a journey and that session is going to provide you the roadmap. That's why it's called a healing roadmap session. 

So in that session, I also asked what would make you feel 10% better this week? Not 100% not reverse your disease. But what could we make you feel even 510% better this weekend? When you ask a question like that in that manner. I find that people are able to now grasp it like and they they, for the first time in a very long time, they may start feeling hopeful that, yes, I can do something about it. It's actually in my hands, as I mentioned. And if you haven't heard it, if you're watching this live, I would love to hear your comments below if you're watching it. If you're listening to it on the podcast tab, you can still reply back to me and I'm going to share some links below in the show notes. Uh, but, you know, tell me if this is something that is true, but so many times we get overwhelmed and we give up hope, you know, of ever getting better because it seems too complicated. And that's why I started that. If healing starts becoming like a full time job, that there is only so much we can do, right? But it need not be that way. And that's why I'm talking about this today, and I'm going to be doing a series on this. 

But I think it's important. It's not only important to know what needs to be done. As I said, what foods need to be taken and what diet we need to follow. But it's also important for the right approach, because I think sometimes in that really slow us down, that keeps us up too much, actually becomes a problem. And um, yeah. And we're talking about gentle guidance. I as I said, this is just a simple shift that you can start making from this week. You can use this prompt, you can journal with it. You can pause the recording if you you know, if you're watching this on replay or listening to it on your podcast app and just shot down what would make me feel 10% better this week, you know, it starts with as gentle a nudge like that and even one soft shift like breathwork, like, um, you know, body scan, anything that can ground you, that can bring you some amount of peace, can actually move the needle, can help you to start getting started, you know, or help you to keep taking the next step. And this is exactly the reason why I created the Autoimmune Healing Toolkit.

 It helps you to stop second guessing your symptoms, second guessing your body, second guessing yourself. So many of us are, you know, have so much of self doubt about what we need to do, whether we know anything about ourselves, about our bodies. And believe me, one of the first things that I realized, uh. Dealing with my clients, dealing with my daughter's health issues, and I've spoken about that in the first podcast episode of Embrace Your Healing Journey. Uh, you know, in various other places is that we are the experts of our own bodies, right? And we need to act like it. We cannot give away our entire power, responsibility to others, whether it's me or health coach or anybody else. Your responsibility is first and foremost yourself, and you are the CEO of your own health, right? Think of it that way. Then you have your team members, which will be doctors, health coaches, other practitioners, therapists. It doesn't matter. They are your team. Look at, you know, so they are going to support you. But the person who's going to lead that thing is going to be you. No one else get that in your head. But if there's any, only one thing that you take away from today's session is going to be this. That you are the CEO of your own health. So you need to start acting accordingly, because that's when you will be able to take some informed decisions. That's when you will be able to take those next steps. And of course,, you need to understand what's going on because what I want you to understand is that, you know, reconnecting with your body is so important because healing starts with trust. If you've lost trust. And so many of us, especially women, lose that trust with our own bodies. We don't have a very good relationship with our bodies, and it's only become worse with social media. So unfortunate. Like young girls nowadays. And women, of course, you know, have such a negative relationship or negative image about their body. 

And it's not I'm not surprised because that's the kind of messages that we get all day long. Like from my childhood days that, you know, there's something wrong with that, there's something wrong with that. But your particular shape is the right shape. Every other shape is wrong. Right. So we is it so surprising that we start or shocking that we start seeing ourselves as broken as our bodies are broken? No it's not. So here I am, here to change all of that.

 And that's exactly why I created the Autoimmune Healing Toolkit. I'm going to share that in the show notes in the comments. And um, if you are watching this on replay or listening to it on your podcast episode, make sure that you get the free e-book and just download it. And I talk about all this. I have some, uh, you know, um, I have some resources there. I have some journaling prompts there because the one key practice there that is actually the most popular, the most downloaded one is making your body your friend. In fact, it's one of the most effective practices, coaching tools that I have used in my coaching, uh, practice for the last eight years that I have been coaching, making your body your friend. It's such an alien concept. 

It is so unfortunate, but it's such an alien concept that having a good relationship with our bodies is where healing truly begins, right? And it starts with listening to our body. It starts with reconnecting with our bodies and trusting our bodies to keep us safe. So that safety has to come from within. Nobody can give it to you. No medication, no doctor, no supplements. 

So this resonated with you. Start with the free toolkit. It's practical, it's simple, it's doable, and it's yours. I'm going to share it in the comments below in the show notes below. So make sure that you get your toolkit to them then if you're ready to take the next step, you know. And if it gives you even a small sense of relief, imagine what we can do together in 90 minutes. And that's where the Healing Roadmap session that I talked about earlier comes in. So again, you can book a Healing roadmap session and you can go much deeper. Or if you're not ready, you can also book a free 45 minutes discovery call. So there are a lot of options for you to start with. You don't have to even wait one more second after today. And yeah, I want to end with and this is live healing from within sessions that I've started from today. Actually, this is the first live session that I'm doing, and I'm going to be doing it on a weekly basis, and it's going to be available on your favorite podcast app as well, is I'm going to end it with one of my favorite activities of reconnecting with my body. All the things that I said. Reconnecting with your body, trusting your body, starts by getting out of your head. And I found that one of the best ways and the easiest ways, and the most fun ways of getting out of your head is to dance, right? Socially moving. 

Our bodies are meant for movement, and it's taken me a long time to realize this. And I've always loved dancing. But who dances right as an adult and who? But then I started learning salsa and Zumba, and I've never stopped. And I do my my cardio workouts. A lot of it is dance and it can be any music, but this is one of my favorite music, and I've decided that every session will end with this dance movement just for a couple of minutes. So just get us into the groove to get us out of our heads and into our bodies, and start trusting our bodies again. So if you're ready, if you're listening to it, if you're watching it on replay, you can just close your eyes and you can just take 2 or 3 minutes out of your day and dance with me and tell me how you feel. 

That's why I wanted to end today's session, and I'll be doing the same every session. Um, music can really set us free. It can help us move our bodies, connect with it, make it our friend, and get out of that war zone that, you know, we've been living in. So I hope that that's the same for you. 

You can connect with me, you can write to me. But most importantly, download that free toolkit, Autoimmune Healing Toolkit, which is in the show notes in the comments, and I'll share the links below everywhere. Yeah, and I'll see you next week.