When Will I Get Better?

One of the most common questions we get at the clinic is "When will I get better?" "How many treatments until _______ is gone?" "When will I achieve permanent balance?"

The text book answer that school taught to give is "everybody is different, but you should start feeling better after a few treatments." This isn't an untrue answer, but we've come to understand that it's a relatively superficial answer.

Our deeper answer is usually not what our patients want to hear up front, but by the end of the conversation, we reach a place of not only understanding, but a place of empowerment.

So here is the gritty hard truth

Life is a constant balancing act, and chances are we will spend our whole lives feeling like something needs healing.

Because even when we think we've finally got a beat on health and balance, or managed to eliminate a symptom - life is always going to present us with challanges.

Perhaps if we always ate a 100% healthy diet, exercised regularly, had perfect posture, never had to work at a computer, never traveled to new places, never had to deal with stress or challenge, and never felt emotion....perhaps then we'd feel free of pain and imbalance - living a life in a perfectly crafted and controlled bubble.

But this is not the case - and to be honest, why would we want it to be the case? While we should obviously strive to eat healthy, exercise, be mindful of our posture, care for ourselves with healing therapies, learn healthy coping mechanisms, and cultivate emotional intelligence - why would we ever want to live a stagnant life devoid of challenge and growth?

This is not to say that you have to suck it up and deal with a debilitating chronic condition. Through mindful effort, you should absolutely get to a place where you feel well and feel like it’s easier to maintain balance; but it’s always going to be an active journey. And while on this journey, you will learn to master whatever chronic condition you're battling so you can live fully, deeply, and optimally. And this is where our textbook answer does ring some truth - the pace at which your healing journey moves is dependent on many factors; and that pace is something you set with your healthcare team.

The healing journey isn't something that's ever really "complete." It's kind of like food - you don't eat once and have all your nutritional needs met for the rest of your life; you have to constantly give your body nourishment. You also don't exercise once to maintain fitness for the rest of your life - you have to move regularly. This is why one of our motto's is

" Eat Well  |  Nourish the Mind  |  Move Daily  |  Sleep Soundly"

Balance and healing are the same way; you don't heal once and then resume life as it always was - you don't find balance and spend the rest of your life frozen in that moment. Life is dynamic, challenging, and ever-changing; and this gives us two choices:

1) We can passively sit back and and let these challenges consume us, and live by simply reacting.

2) We can become active co-creators in our life experience. We can learn to dance with the challenges of life. We can embrace healing and balance as an active journey that inspires growth and self-mastery.

If you can't tell - we tend to think Choice 2 is the way to go. And if we can commit to living life this way, we can get to a point where this dance, where this healing and balancing, is as easy as breathing.

So - when will you get better? Let's go ahead and try to release ourselves from that question. Let the question be, instead, when will you become the captain of your own healing journey and what is this journey going to look like?