Dr. Erin Hayford [00:00:00]:
Hi, and welcome back to this episode of the Sacred Illness podcast. Today I'm talking about something that is potentially controversial, but I think a lot of us either embrace the idea or are open to the idea, or hopeful that the idea is true and exists. And the idea that I'm speaking of is that of miracles. So I recently posted something on Instagram about the miracles that I have witnessed in my own work with folks. So back before COVID and shutdowns and isolation and all those things happened, I used to work with people in person in a small office in central Maine where I used to live. One of the things I would do with folks, aside from somatic therapy, was a hands on modality called craniosacral therapy. And so between the two things that I was doing with the somatic work and the craniosacral therapy, I saw a lot of really profound and miraculous things transpire. And so I made a post about it because I wanted to exemplify how this work can be truly that powerful and that life changing and shifting.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:01:05]:
And the timelines that we often have in our head about what healing looks like or how long it has to take or the steps that we have to go through are often not true. They're often these constructs, or they're based on other people's stories or algorithmic kind of outcomes that are maybe the norm for a lot of people, but don't necessarily have to be the norm for ourselves. Work that I do is about busting paradigms and kind of revolutionizing and inspiring the way that we think about health, about healing, about illness, about our bodies, and what is truly capable in all of those categories, again, beyond what we're sort of told or what convention dictates or what we see happen in people because of the way that our modern medical system is set up. The reason I'm all about that, about changing paradigms and shifting mindsets, is because we know very clearly through research that when we believe something or expect something, that is often what comes to pass. So, for example, we have good studies on people who receive some sort of terminal diagnosis, and they're told, you have this amount of time to live. Very oftentimes they meet that expectation, right? Their end of life comes at about that same amount of time that they're given to live, whereas folks who are given maybe a more hopeful outcome or are told like, this is the typical thing, but we're going to fight this, or we're going to do everything we can, or they themselves seek an alternative outcome and have a different belief system and maybe are not willing to believe that outcome, that terminal diagnosis, or that amount of time they have left to live, and they find ways to rise above and either far exceed that outcome and live much longer or never succumb to the illness at all. Right? They die of other causes or natural causes because they shift something in their inner alchemy, which then shifts how their body responds to that illness. And so for me, this is just some of the really magical and inspirational pieces of this work where I deeply believe, because I have seen myself, I've experienced myself, that the prognosis we receive is just one possible outcome.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:03:23]:
It's just one possible way that this could shake out and could manifest and typically does. If we follow that mindset, that belief system, the conventional system for treating it, the way that we typically engage with illness and healing and health and all of those things, if we follow the algorithm, then, yes, that's the outcome, right? Like, that's what research is, is when we do this, plus this, plus this, this is what happens. And medicine really likes predictable things like that. So they really like to see, like, when we have this illness with this treatment plan, which is the number one gold standard of how we're treating this condition, this is the outcome. So they know how to predict things. I think that honestly takes away a lot of our power and our capacity as humans to tap into the innate healing capacity that is within all of us. And not only that, but it puts us in a box, right? It says that every single person with this condition is going to have this outcome, and this is the prognosis and this is the likely steps you're going to follow in your diagnosis. This is how it's going to go.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:04:30]:
When I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in my early 20s, that's what happened to me. They said, these are the medications you take. This is how this illness is going to progress. These are the surgeries you're likely facing at some point in your life, et cetera, right? Like, this sort of path was laid out for me, and as I often say, either because I'm stubborn or because I just had something in me that was a deeper knowing. I refused to accept that as my outcome. And I'm so grateful that I didn't accept it because otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you, right? I don't know who I would be or what I would be doing, but it was because of my illness and my lack of willingness to accept the prognosis I was given that led me into the work that I do and led me into the experience of getting the opportunity to witness folks heal and transform their symptoms right in front of my face. This can get uncomfortable for folks because it can start to feel really woo, for lack of a better word, right? And this is where people get labeled as quacks or whatever, like those kind of derogatory terms. That's okay if you feel that way or if you believe that, right? That's okay.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:05:38]:
You can believe that and you can tune out of this podcast. But my belief system and my rooted in what we now are understanding about the nervous system and the impact of trauma and the impact of stress, the impact of thoughts and beliefs, there's all these breakthroughs coming. In neuroscience, we understand that these shifts in thinking and expectation and what we're believing about ourselves and what we believe to be possible have profound impacts on health and healing. In my work, I also understand that the disease itself, the way that something is manifesting in the body that we label as disease, is unique for everyone, right? So we, for example, like with my illness, which is, again, Crohn's, or was Crohn's the definition I'm given, or the reason I'm given for that illness is, well, you have it because your immune system is attacking itself. But when I dug deeper into why is that happening? Why is my immune system attacking itself? That's when the explanations start to fall apart, right? Because there isn't a really good explanation as to why all of a sudden my immune system starts turning on me. And sure, we can blame genetics, we can blame lifestyle factors, right? But when I dug into those things, none of them really made any sense. And that's when I embarked on what I refer to as my healing journey, which led me to mind body medicine and led to me understanding my history of trauma and nervous system dysregulation and all the things that I talk about in all my other stuff. So when we again subscribe to this kind of one size fits all, we are ignoring the intricate, individual, unique tapestry of who we are as individuals, our individual stories, our individual pathways, and what led to us getting this illness right, getting these symptoms.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:07:25]:
And if we just subscribe to the one size fits all definition, then we subscribe to the one size fits all treatment, the one size fits all prognosis. And because it is so strong for us, the reaction and the response is so strong in our mind and body, when we believe that that is true, that that is the only path that's possible, that that outcome is inevitable, then it happens, right? And so it kind of reinforces the research and the literature that is saying this is the outcome, and then we see it happen, and we're like, yes, that's the outcome. So this work that I do really does ask for us to kind of go outside the box and dare to believe that something else could be possible. Because honestly, what do we have to lose? What do we have to lose by believing that something else is possible? That believing another outcome could happen, that believing that maybe that is what the majority of people do, because that is what the majority of people are told. But what if that doesn't have to be true for me? What if I do this differently? What if I look at this differently? What if I shift my paradigm and my understanding and my relationship with my body, my illness, my history, what healing means, what health means, what I truly want, who I truly am, et cetera, right? All these things. And that's where things really start to shift. So when I was reflecting on this idea of miracles, I had three cases or patients that really stood out in my mind that exemplified what is possible. When all of us are in alignment with what's possible and what we really want, right? When we're really ready on this entire cellular level to let go of something, we see what's possible.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:09:01]:
So let's go through the three cases together, because I want to share them with you all here as well. First one is a woman in her 40s. She and I have worked together for a long time, and we started to do kind of more of the somatic mind body stuff later in our treatments together. And she was coming to me for chronic pain. So she had been dealing with chronic pain the majority of her life, a lot of it in her back, and had tried all of the things, was facing possible surgery, done a lot of chiropractic work, like pain management stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And there was no real discernible cause for all the workups she had had. It wasn't like, oh, yeah, you have this condition or this problem or this is the source of your pain. Everything would always come back normal, and yet she would have pain.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:09:51]:
She had very intense pain, some days worse than others. So we started to do some work on the pain that she was experiencing and started to dig into the symptom itself and how it was showing up in her body and where it was showing up in her body. And the way this often looks for me is we will do some grounding and safety work beforehand just to help her feel safe, to go to help my patients feel safe going deeper into this exploration process of what might be behind the symptom. Then when we started to go into the pain itself, it's really interesting when we start to go into the space in the body where the symptom lives, what can surface, right? And sometimes it's really surprising. Like, people are like, I'm randomly thinking about this memory from when I was 17 or something like that, right? It's just this random thing can come up in the mind body, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, then that reminds me of this. And that leads to that. And then these emotions start to come up. Then we start to get the full story of what's going on for her.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:10:50]:
For this woman with the chronic pain, it was a lot of betrayal, specifically with her sister. And so we started to go into that and work with it. Sometimes the kind of emotional wound that is stuck in the body that has not been worked through and released is very metaphorical and literal for the pain or the symptom that is showing up. And in this woman's case, that was true. So she had felt stabbed in the back. These were her words by her sister, by this betrayal that had taken place. And this was not a one off event. This is something that she had experienced over and over again many times, feeling stabbed in the back.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:11:30]:
And obviously, that's going to feel painful. If you're being stabbed in the back, that's going to hurt. And so we worked through it. And by worked through it, I mean we helped her access the emotions that she was not accessing, that she was not feeling, that she was not experiencing and not releasing from her system because it wasn't safe to do so, or she didn't want to damage the relationship further. Right. There's a lot of reasons why we have emotions about something and then keep them in our body, because it's safer in the moment or for whatever reason, right? We feel it's safer to keep it in our body. But when we don't go through that full expression and that full release of whatever it is we experienced in response to that incident, then that causes issues. And so for her, it was, understandably a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, just a lot of confusion and grief.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:12:19]:
And just like, why did you do this? Why did this happen? And so I helped her move through all of those emotions in that session. And at the end of the session, she sat up because she was on the table. We were doing the kind of combo mind body craniosacral work. And she was just like, oh, my God, my back feels different. She could sit up and not have pain, and it was just kind of like, I could tell she was trying to make sense of it, right? Like, her body and mind was like, what is going on right now? And so she got up and moved around, and she's like, yeah, my back doesn't hurt. I don't feel it, right. And so we finished our session. She came back again in a few weeks, same thing.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:13:01]:
Pain was gone. The pain did come back a few weeks later, and we explored it, and it was a very similar theme. And what I have found in folks where they have these miraculous, sort of, like, where the symptoms just go away, right? And to me, that's a miracle, because when you try everything and you try relentlessly to get rid of that pain and whatever it is, and nothing works, and then all of a sudden, in the moment, in the course of an hour, it disappears. That's a miracle, right? The fact that it came back to me isn't saying that it's a relapse, because what happened in that session where the pain was back, like I said, we found a similar theme coming up, and because that was her body's kind of familiar way of expressing that stuck emotion, it showed up in the same way. And so, same thing. We processed and released, and the pain went back. It receded again. So that's something else that I see often in this work, is that we can get to a place of symptom resolution oftentimes in sessions.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:13:59]:
If it comes back, it's not because it's like a relapse, like I said, or something like that happening. It's because something else is now manifesting in that same way in your body, and it's just like the next layer, okay, that symptom is back. What is becoming expressed through this symptom now? What's this next layer that I need to work through in order to release this from my body? Second case that I consider a miracle was a woman in her 60s who has had chronic constipation her whole life. Literally. I always ask, when did this start? And she's like, as long as I can remember, I have not been able to have an easy, normal bowel movement. So, same thing. We started doing work. We started exploring that symptom.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:14:42]:
We went to the place in her body where she often feels uncomfortable and a lot of fullness and got to this place of this secret that she had been kind of forced to hold her whole life because it was not safe. She was a child, and she was told in those uncertain terms, like, if you tell this secret, you will be very hurt. And so she held it in her body and held it in her body and held it and held it held. And this was early in life. And so her whole life, she held onto this secret, which was not even just a secret, it was something that was happening to her. Right. So you can kind of fill in the blanks. I'm not going to go into the details.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:15:20]:
So she held this in her body her whole life, literally, had not talked about it, hadn't shared this story with anyone. And then it came out on the table. It came out as she got into that spot. It was just like, oh, my gosh, it's this. It's this thing. And she just had to let it go. She had to release it. And she shared with me what it was and what was going on.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:15:41]:
And this was almost 60 years later, so it felt safe for her to kind of release it. And again, this interesting metaphor of the body holding on to something and what is constipation, right? But it's holding on to something. It's a lack of release. And not that every time some. Again, this is not an algorithm. One size fits all. Not every case of constipation is holding on to a secret or holding something in. Oftentimes it is.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:16:09]:
But what that thing is that you're holding in is different across the board. For every person, it's going to be something different. But it was just interesting to see that, like, holding something in, really painful, really huge, really uncomfortable. And her body was doing the exact same thing. Literally. That night, she goes home, has a bowel movement, and then from then on, she's like, I don't even understand this. I'm just going poop. I'm just having bowel movements, like, normal, what you would think of as a normal bowel movement.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:16:43]:
Like, they're easy to pass. They're regular. She was dumbfounded by it, and I honestly was, too, because even though I have seen these things happen many times, and like I said, even if it's not, like, total, absolute resolution from that point forward, I've seen symptoms that have previously never, ever been able to shift within a session. And so every time I see that, I'm blown away by it, because it's just so powerful and so incredible, this mind body connection that is, to me, foundational and so necessary and so important to look at in the work that we're doing in our healing work. Because if we're skipping it. We're missing the root cause. We're missing the reason that that symptom there is in the first place. And so that was case number two.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:17:29]:
Case number three, I'm going to have to look at my phone because I can't pronounce this. It's a really rare condition called Malay debarkment syndrome. Malde Debarkman syndrome. It's a french term, which is basically what it's referring to, is this feeling of being on a boat, right? So it's often triggered by travel. When someone travels, when they literally go on a boat or travel on an airplane or do some sort of motion related activity, once that motion stops, they will continue to feel this rocking in their system, this kind of motion sickness feeling. They often feel dizzy, confused, and anxiety. Right. It's not a comfortable feeling to just constantly feel this rocking and dizziness in your body.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:18:17]:
So imagine how you feel like on a boat, right? Just like constantly feeling that in your system is not good. So again, it's rare, but she developed it after going on an extended flight, and I think it also included some boat travel, and we did some work on it. And in that session, she had substantial. A substantial decrease in her symptoms to the point where it was, like, almost negligible, which, again, is profound for someone who has, like, a ten out of ten symptom presentation every single day of their life. Nothing helps, nothing makes a dent. And then in an hour's time working with a symptom, it goes down. It was probably, like a two out of ten by the end of that session. And this is a condition or a syndrome that can happen to folks, like, for a couple of hours after travel.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:19:12]:
In the really bad cases, it can last for a year or years after travel. And in my patient's case, she was months into this, and she had had it before where it had lasted about a year and then resolved, and then she traveled again, and it came back. And so every single day of her life, feeling like she's on a boat, like, I can't even imagine how uncomfortable that must be. And in that session, her symptoms went down so much that it was, like, barely detectable and tolerable. From that point forward, the symptoms continued to go down more and more until eventually they resolved, I think a few weeks later. In her case, what we found, again, very metaphorical and sort of translated directly to the symptoms themselves was this need for her to be rocked by her biological mother. And so there was a lot of inner child, pre memory, pre verbal stuff. There that we had to process, which is always so fascinating to me, that even when we are not capable of making memories, even when we don't have language, our body remembers.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:20:16]:
Our body is holding on to and remembering what's happening. And we can access those pre verbal memories and preverbal experiences through somatic work, because the somatic work is working with the body, working with what the body feels. And our conscious adult brains are often able to put the pieces together and say, I don't know how I know this, but I just have this really deep feeling that I was three months old and I was in a crib by myself. I was crying. And what I really desperately needed in that moment was to be held by my mom and rocked in a rocking chair or whatever it was. And that was exactly. And that was what she said. Right.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:20:51]:
She had this deep, deep feeling that all her system really wanted in that moment was to be rocked. And so why traveling on a boat? Why traveling on a plane triggers this in her? I don't know. Right. Like, there's mysteries beyond what I feel like I can fathom and understand in this work. All I know is that something about the rocking and the motion in those traveling experiences brought up in her deep, deep psyche, in her deep, somatic memory, this need to be rocked by her biological mother. And so when we allowed her to basically reprogram that event, we went in and did some somatic reprogramming and some neuro reprogramming, helped her little three month old self feel held, feel rocked. Like, gave that inner child part of her what they needed. The symptoms subsided.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:21:39]:
Right? So oftentimes when we go into that experience, we express the emotions, and then we can reprogram by. Obviously, we can't change the past, but we know it's very powerful when we allow that younger version of ourselves to receive what was desperately needed in that moment or to express what was desperately needed to be expressed in that moment. That that often allows our nervous system to release that event and heal that event and move on. To wrap this up, I want to say again that these miraculous outcomes are not always the norm, but it is very, very common for us to see symptom at least decrease in these sessions because of, again, our ability to go in and release some of what the body is holding on to that is resulting in the symptoms. So every time we go into the body and do some of this release work, oftentimes there's a lessening or a decreasing of symptoms or just a deeper awareness of what might be going on. And I believe from what I have witnessed and what I have experienced in myself and worked on with others, that when every cell in our body, and not just cell, but every inner child version of us, and I'll get to that in one moment, is ready and willing and on board and in agreement, like, we are ready to let this go, we are ready to heal this. We feel safe and we feel supported and we feel ready to release this from our system. That is when miracles, so called miracles, happen, right? Like spontaneous remissions and miraculous healings and all those sorts of things.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:23:13]:
It's when every part of us is on board and ready to let it go. The inner child piece I'm going to talk about in the next episode, because it's a big part of this work. And the reason I mention it is because, again, we have what's called an inner child, but it's not just one child, right? It's every child we ever were in our lifetimes. Because every part of us, every child, every age we were, has had different experiences. They've encountered different traumas, they've had different caretakers or different friends or social situations, right? Like, our lives are constantly evolving and the players and the experiences in our lives at any given moment are different. And so therefore, these inner children are taking in different information and having different experiences and creating different stories about themselves in the world. And so every single one of them might have a different perspective about the world and about who you are and about what the world is. Some of those perspectives might be in agreement, and some might not be.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:24:15]:
So let's say my four year old self believes that dogs are safe because she had a dog in her life and loved the dog and had a wonderful experience. But then let's say my seven year old self got attacked by a friend's dog and holds this story, dogs are not safe. If I'm working on some symptom that has to do with that dog, like with dogs in general, there's going to be parts of me that are ready to let it go, are ready to let go of a fear of dogs, ready to let go of anything that is manifesting as that fear of dogs. Because there are parts of me that are like, dogs are fine, dogs are friendly, dogs are fun, like, they're safe, they're sweet. But there's going to be that one part of me that says, absolutely not. Do you not remember when we got attacked by this dog? Why would we ever, ever feel safe around this? Why would we ever let our guard down around dogs? So working with the inner child is so important because that version of us is. We need to validate her. We need to hear her and let her express her version of the story in order for all parts of us to get on board with what we're trying to do.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:25:22]:
And so oftentimes, if something is stuck, if something is not moving forward, if something is not fully releasing, it's because there is a part or parts of us who are not ready to do so. And forcing it, or trying to override it, or scolding or criticizing or beating ourselves up or whatever, is absolutely not the way forward. Because it's like scolding a child. And when a child gets scolded, they don't learn a lesson. They just internalize it further and say, this is really bad. This is why we don't like this thing, because it creates us getting in trouble. So we'll get into that in the next episode. But I just wanted to touch on that really quickly because that is how I conceptualize.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:25:58]:
Spontaneous or miraculous healing is when every part of us, when every cell, when every version of us who has moved through this life is on board and says, yes, let's let this go, let's release it. It is not us. It is not who we want to be. It is not giving us the life we want. It is not in alignment with our belief systems anymore. Let's let it go. When that happens, that's when miracles can happen. And that's when symptoms can go from a ten to a zero in an hour's time.
