Dr. Erin Hayford [00:00:20]:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Sacred Illness podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Aaron Hayford.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:00:24]:
And to other we're going to explore how illness is not a roadblock to the rest of your life, but rather an invitation to reclaim your whole, vibrant self. Before we begin today's episode, just my standard medical disclaimer. This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only. The content should not be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any medical concerns.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:00:52]:
Welcome to episode four of the sacred illness podcast. Today's episode is titled the Invitation of Illness, and I am your host, Dr. Aaron Hayford. I will be going into this concept in detail today, which is one of the bigger underlying concepts of the work that I do, and the reason for that was outlined in episode one, which sort of introduces this idea of sacred illness and why I think of illnesses as sacred, but I wanted to go into it in more detail today in this episode. So welcome, and let's get into it by going on a little journey together. When I was in my late teens, early twenty s, I started getting really sick. So my whole life I've had issues with digestive stuff, like stomach aches and bad digestion. Just really, like, my gut was kind of the place.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:01:37]:
If I was going to get sick, that was where I manifested symptoms, but they were never serious. It was just sort of like, my stomach hurts. I would take something, I would fall asleep, I'd be fine. But when I was in the later years of high school, about to start to get ready for graduation, thinking about college, I was starting to get more and more rapidly sick. So I was having a lot of pain. It wasn't just GI pain at this point, either. I was starting to have musculoskeletal pain. I was still having digestive issues, but they were ramping up in severity, like really, really painful stomach aches and bowel issues.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:02:09]:
All the fun stuff that comes along with digestive complaints. Actually, I ended up having to go see a gastroenterologist because my symptoms started getting so severe. I was really, really weak. I couldn't really stand up all that well or have a lot of energy for a sustained amount of time, which for someone in their late teens about to go to college, right, like, we think of these as like the glory days, right, of life. I was in one of the most challenging points in my life in terms of energy, and I had a lot of brain fog. I was feeling really demotivated. I just didn't feel good. I didn't feel like myself.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:02:43]:
And so I ended up going to see a gastroenterologist, and after a series of tests and various imaging studies and all the different things they have to do to work that up, which a lot of them were not fun. I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is an autoimmune condition that impacts the gut. And so I was given a list of medications that I would have to take for the rest of my life. And I was also told that surgery was going to be a likely outcome of this diagnosis, because that is just sort of how they think of this condition. They think of it as incurable, progressive. Usually, remission can sometimes be achieved with medications, but there always has to be something kind of damning the condition up, so to speak, like holding it back, because if you just let it go, it's going to progress. And so I had this pivotal moment with my GI doctor that I remember so clearly. Let's see, it was in the mid 2000s, like, 2005 ish, when I was diagnosed.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:03:45]:
And so I remember asking my doctor, I was, like, 2021 years old. What should I eat? Okay, so here's all these pills I have to take. I'm probably facing surgery. This is my gut. So what should I eat? Are there foods I should avoid? Are there things I should be mindful of? And this sticks in my head, and I feel like this was sort of the seed that got planted, that was like, this can't be it. But he said to me, just take your pills. Don't worry about food. And to me, that was, again, the moment that sort of shifted things for me.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:04:17]:
And up until that point, I was a kid, I had just gone to the doctor, done my annual physicals, done all the things that you do as a kid growing up and going to the doctor. And I had no exposure to any other way of thinking about health or wellness or illness or anything. But there was something about him saying that that really woke me up, that really made me feel like, this can't be it. This is the end of the line. This is the best we can do in our world, right? When someone gets really sick, this is the best we can offer them. And I don't know, maybe I'm just stubborn, but I refused to accept that as the answer. And I didn't start researching right then and there, but I started to pick things up here and there. So I was working at a farm at the time, and this farmer started introducing me to this concept of food as medicine, which I had already kind of known working on a farm and being, growing food for people and having this connection to plants and food in that way.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:05:17]:
But she really helped me start looking at macronutrients and how much you need and vitamins and minerals and what has an impact on the body. And it just started to bring me into my body. So that was the initiation of this illness. It was like, okay, so you have two options here. You keep going about your life the way that you have been, the way that the circumstances in which this illness came up into your life. You can continue that path. You can take your meds, you can potentially get surgery. Like, that path is right there.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:05:48]:
The other alternative is you start to have a deeper relationship with your body and try to figure out what your body needs and figure out why this disease was able to manifest in the first place. And so starting to talk about food was this beginning, pivotal moment for me of like, okay, what is food? What is nutrition, what are nutrients? What does my body actually need to feel good, and what am I not giving it? Right? This is just not stuff that we think about, really. I mean, maybe these days people do, but certainly when I was growing up, it wasn't a conversation that people were having in their late teens, early 20s about what nutrients do I need to be healthy? Because you're usually pretty healthy at that age. You usually feel good, you have energy. You don't really have to think about stuff. And to me, that is the invitation of illness. It's this invitation to start to think about stuff, to start to tune in in this way that we never would otherwise, right? We just go about our lives. We move through our day to day, and we don't really take the time to do a lot of introspection, do a lot of checking in.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:06:49]:
We have such busy, over scheduled lives, right? Like, this is the american way for those who live in the US. We just kind of go about our day. We just live our lives. We do our crazy schedules, we come home exhausted, we take care of the kids, we make the dinner, we pass out in front of the tv, and then we start it all over again. And it's this really chaotic way of being. And there's a lot of reasons we disconnect from our bodies. So being busy is certainly like the icing on the cake. But I think our disconnection, or I know our disconnection from our bodies, often starts young, and this is a whole other topic for another time.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:07:24]:
But there's reasons that over the years, our bodies start to feel unsafe, and we start to not want to connect to them, and we want to not be in them, or we never learn how to pay attention to them in the first place. Because we have to have some sort of external perspective in order to stay safe and to take care of ourselves, right? Like, there's something in our environment or in our world that doesn't feel safe. And so we have to have this more externally focused perspective, which means we neglect focusing inward on ourselves. Again, this is a bigger topic, but whatever the reason, we turn our focus out of our body to the outer world versus the inner world. Then that's where we start to ignore what's going on there. We start to not understand or see or feel the things that are getting stored in our bodies and the things that are getting stuck in our bodies. We start to figure out, like, who do I need to be in order to make everyone around me comfortable, in order to survive, in order to get my needs met? Who do I need to become in order to get through this life? And so again, our bodies become kind of these storage containers of emotions, of needs, of traumatic experiences, and not getting our needs met, not expressing our voice, not being our authentic self. And this is talked about a lot in that onion layer episode that was prior to this episode.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:08:41]:
And so as we are more and more disconnected, more and more piles up. Our bodies try to get our attention in various ways. Life tries to get our attention in various ways. Right? So depending on your belief system, things can be put in our path to try to get us to be like, this isn't working. I wonder why. Or this feels really uncomfortable to my body. Maybe this isn't right for me, but the usual response is that we just keep pushing. When a roadblock comes up, we just push harder to get through it, or we find a way around it, or we ignore it, or something like that.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:09:12]:
Illness is this really unique roadblock that gets put up in our lives that is typically not. We're not able to ignore it, we're not able to get around it. We're not able to just be like, meh, whatever. Like, for me, I couldn't get out of bed at a period of time during my illness. There was no way I could ignore that. I was in my late teens, early twenty s. I wanted to be like, playing sports and going out with my friends and getting ready for college and all of these things. And I was in bed.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:09:37]:
So that became this pivotal moment in my life where I no longer could ignore what was going on. And so again, these two paths emerge. One is, you can continue down the path where this illness, the path where you're living and being that same person when the illness arrived in your life, or you can choose a different way and most of us continue the same path because we don't know that there's another way. Like, I had that experience with my doctor. I wasn't given a really exciting different path. It was like, no, just take meds and just keep being you. You do you. That was the message, right? When really what I felt in the core of my being was, there is another way, and I'm going to figure out what that is.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:10:21]:
And so by accepting that invitation of illness, like I said, I started to tune into my body differently. I started to consider, what does it need? What is it lacking? And part of that work can include nutrition, medications, herbal medicine, movement, spirituality. There's lots and lots and lots of ways in which we can take care of our bodies. And so all of those things become important, however, what I discovered in my journey. So for the next decade, I started to pick up little things here and there. I studied herbal medicine, eventually went to naturopathic medical school, because I was like, I need to figure this out. Everything was kind of like, that's a piece of it, that's a piece of it, that's a piece of it. I was like, kind of glomming together these different options, but nothing was like it.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:11:10]:
This is the core of the core of the stuff that I need to be working on. Until I started to study mind body medicine. And that's where I really started to see, not just understand cognitively how important that was, but I started to see the results in my own body. The shifts that started to take place when I started to get into my subconscious brain, working with those things that were stored in my body, that were at that point unknown to me, because that's that subconscious, right? We put things in there, we suppress things, and they go away. As far as we know, we're not conscious of them, but they're still there. And so when I started to tap into that storage container of aspects of myself, traumatic memories, events, places where I wasn't speaking up, speaking my truth, places where I was completely out of alignment with who I really was and my core values, as I started to pull those things out, that's where I started to see these dramatic shifts taking place in my life. And so to me, a holistic healing treatment plan has to include this work, has to include this mind body, subconscious, unconscious, however you refer to it work in order to get into those things that are wiring our brain and keeping us in this state of survival and keeping us out of touch with who we really are. Because we can take as many medications as we want, we can have as many surgeries as we want, we can take all the supplements and do all the diets and do all the things.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:12:35]:
But if this foundation is not laid where we're taking care of this misalignment with who we really are in our core selves, if we're not taking care of that piece, then every other treatment is going to fall short because there's this kind of key piece missing at the very, very foundation of who we are. The way I think of it is this foundation is the ability for our body to shift into a place where healing can actually take place. When we are in alignment with ourselves, when we are speaking our truth, when we are expressing our needs and being met in the way we need, and we're surrounded by the things that support us and love us and make us feel alive. That's like the rich soil out of which everything else can blossom. And it literally physiologically shifts our bodies into a state where healing can actually happen. If we do not do this work, we are more often than not shifted into a place called sympathetic activation, or fight or flight or survival mode, due to lots of reasons that, again, are beyond the scope of this conversation. But being in that mode does not allow for healing to take place. Healing cannot take place when we are in this activated go, go.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:13:49]:
Just ignore my emotions, ignore my needs, ignore myself. Our bodies physiologically cannot heal in that space. And so again, we can take medications that might help for a time, like they might calm the symptom down and make us feel better. We can go to therapy and talk about things and that can feel better for a time, because there's this release of being, getting some of the stuff out. But if we're missing that subconscious piece of what has been held in our bodies and how we are continuously choosing that path of misalignment, then again, nothing else is going to make a huge shift long term. And so the way I think about the work that I do in my community space, which you can read the details down below in the show notes, I work on that subconscious piece in a way that helps to build that strong foundational aspect and enrich the soil of yourself in order for anything else that you're engaging in healing and health wise, to really blossom. And so my own healing journey, after ten years of trial and error, I am now symptom free, and have been since basically that time, 2013 ish was when my condition went into remission and has stayed there. So about ten years of trying to figure things out and then ten years of being symptom free.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:15:05]:
Of course, there's always times where my symptoms not. I never have, like, a full on Crohn's flare up, but I'll get stomach aches or I'll have digestive stuff show up. And for me, it's this red flag of, like, tune in, tune in, tune in. And so thinking about illness as an invitation, it's inviting you to tune into your body, to listen to yourself in a new way, to be in relationship with yourself in this different way that is potentially very life giving. And I think this is a really hard thing for us to sometimes wrap our heads around because we're in this culture where illness is the worst thing ever. It is bad. We have to get rid of it, we have to suppress it. We have to cut it out, right? We want to take medications.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:15:46]:
I make it go away immediately. And again, sometimes those things are necessary, and I'm not saying that those are never needed, ever. However, they are higher up on a ladder, right? If we think about treatments being kind of like a hierarchy of intensity, if we don't have those first rungs of the ladder, then we are going to not have a very sturdy ladder. If we're climbing all the way up to the top, right? We want to really build that ground level, make sure that ladder is grounded really well, have all of those pieces in place before we start to climb up that ladder to other things, if necessary. And so this invitation is tune in, see what's there, work with those subconscious pieces, start to build that inner connection. This invitation is to come back to yourself, right? It's to find yourself again, to be yourself again. And when that starts to shift and when that starts to happen, sometimes we still need to bring in other elements higher up on that hierarchy, higher up on that ladder, and sometimes we don't. But we'll never know if we just start there and start in that suppression mode, because that tends to shove things deeper into our body and create more symptoms and more problems and more illnesses, right? Because that root issue is still there.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:16:58]:
And we see that so often when someone is treating an illness and that symptom starts to calm down, but then something else shows up, and then that has to be taken care of, and then that goes away with the new treatment, but then something else comes up. And so it's this game of whack a mole where we're just pushing the cause of the illness somewhere else. And to use my own condition as an example, I don't have the numbers in front of me, so I'm not going to give you exact percentages. A lot of people will get surgery on their gut to remove the diseased part, and I believe it's about 30% of people will have to get, will see disease relapse within the first year. And then every year after that, there's a 10% increase of the Crohn's disease coming back to another part of the bowel within that year. So, basically, after seven years of getting that surgery, there's a 100% chance that that condition is going to come back. And I think it's like 50% to 60% of people have to get another surgery because of that. So that, to me, really exemplifies how we're not actually cutting out the disease.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:18:06]:
Like, if the disease was this section of the bowel, then that should take care of it, right? So what is going on? Why is that immune system continually attacking the bowel? Why is that happening? Because it doesn't happen to everyone. There's reasons it's happening to some of us. There's reasons autoimmune conditions are happening to some of us, or this disease is happening to some of us. Why is it manifesting? What is that root? And when we start to look at that, when we start to take that invitation of that illness, saying, tune in, there's a message here. Don't shut me up. Don't suppress me. Don't ignore me. Listen.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:18:39]:
Tune in and listen. Then we really start to find that path back to ourselves. Thanks so much for tuning into another episode of the Sacred Illness podcast. If you found the information shared here inspirational, we welcome you to check out the sacred illness community. This is an online educational space where we delve much deeper into these topics, as well as provide step by step practical guidelines for how to begin to explore these concepts in your own life.
