The 5 Layers of Healing: A Roadmap to Lasting Transformation (Ep. 3)

What if the key to true healing goes far beyond medicine?

After living with ulcerative colitis for 12 years and running out of answers from doctors, I embarked on a journey through more than 50 healing modalities — and discovered the 5 layers of healing that changed my life forever.

In this solocast, I’ll share:

• Why focusing only on the body isn’t enough
• The surprising link between your mind, emotions, and physical symptoms
• How energy and soul-level work hold the missing pieces to lasting transformation

If you’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work, this episode will open your eyes to what’s truly possible. Healing is your birthright

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Transcript

Hello beautiful soul. Welcome back. Have you ever been so sick that you're willing to do anything to feel better? I certainly have been at that point in my life. I suffered on and off for 12 years from an invisible chronic illness called ulcerative colitis that causes bleeding, intestinal ulcers. Really fun stuff, let me tell you. And I dealt with it with Western medicine for a really long time until the medication stopped working, and I went to see every single specialist there was to see, and none of them had any answers for me. They couldn't tell me why my body was behaving the way it was, and they had no more solutions for me because their only answer was medication and it wasn't working. 

At that point on my journey, I decided to take my health into my own hands and I was going to heal myself. And it helped that I had been running a corporate wellness business for many, many, many years. I was surrounded with wellness practitioners and healers, and that's what I did. I embarked on this incredible journey to heal my body that took me to working with over 50 different healing modalities. I really witnessed some incredible miracles. I worked with some powerful healers wit abilities beyond the scope of what we can understand is even possible. So many amazing miracles happened on this journey and I'm so excited to share all these stories with you. 

But at the core of it all, the foundation of everything that I want to share with you are these five layers of healing – Physical, Mental, Emotional, Energetic, and Spiritual. Now the first layer is the outermost layer. It's the Physical layer of healing. That's where Western medicine lives. That's where most people focus their time and attention. And these are going to be the things that you can do for your body physically. So that includes your diet and nutrition, moving your body, exercise, and body work. Sometimes changing your diet is enough. I will tell you that I worked with a Korean medicine doctor at one point when I was having a horrible flare up of the colitis, and he practices something called Eight Body Types, and he put me in a very specific body type category that has a very certain way of eating. And it was literally upside down from the way that I had been used to eating the foods that I made my family all the time, like chicken and turkey, apparently were poisoned to my body. I was really shocked, but within three days of changing the food around, 50% of my symptoms were gone within three days! I mean, it's just blew my mind. And it really goes to show you that your food really, truly is your greatest medicine or your worst poison. So that should always be something that you look at if you're dealing with any kind of chronic issue, an illness, anything at all. Always start with what are you eating because there might be certain foods that are irritating to your system. There might be other foods that you're lacking. There might be a nutritional imbalance in your system. That's why supplements and vitamins are so important. Because even if you eat the healthiest diet ever, we're still not getting all the nutrients that we need because our soil has been depleted. So, an apple that we eat today isn't as healthy as an apple that our grandparents ate when they were younger. 

Having the proper supplementation is really important to your health, so make sure you're getting enough minerals, etc. Someone might work with a nutritionist on that, or they might work with a naturopathic doctor. I grew up with my uncle being a naturopath, so it was so amazing my whole life. I could call him up. Uncle Dov, what do I do about this? I'm having this symptom that and he would tell me, “All right, you should cut this out of your diet. I want you to start taking this supplement. Take these Chinese herbs, do this cleanse and detox, add these things in, etc.” and that was great. So that was normal for me growing up. And gosh, I miss that man. He passed away a couple of years ago and I certainly miss having him around to support me through this journey. He was one of the healers that I worked with initially, and I did see nutritionists as well. But that's only one piece of the puzzle, right? 

Maybe you change your diet and it gives you the results, and that's all you need. Fantastic. Maybe you need to move your body in a new way or in a different way. Maybe you need surgery. Maybe you need medication. One thing that gets overlooked a lot is sleep. We live in a culture where we glorify busyness, and so often we're not getting enough sleep. But the truth is, your body actually heals while you sleep. Your immune system is working while you sleep. So, if you are not getting at least seven hours of sleep every night, you're literally taking years off of your life expectancy. And if you are trying to heal from any kind of chronic illness you definitely should be prioritizing your sleep more than anything else, because that's when your body is going to rejuvenate and heal itself. So, focus on some sleep as well. 

Now, in this Pysical layer, you may try several things and it might work. And that's all you need at that time. Fantastic. But if that doesn't work for you, if you've tried all the dietary changes, if you're taking the supplements, if you've done a detox, then a cleanse. And that's another thing I do want to mention. Detox your body. Every couple of years we have an overload of toxins that we pick up heavy metals, even parasites that we pick up along the way based on the foods that we eat and the fact that our air isn't clean and neither is our water. So, our livers get overloaded, our kidneys get overloaded, and being able to do a detox or cleanse every couple of years is so healing for the body. It just it's like taking out the trash every now and again and it's just over collecting otherwise. Now I will suggest always working with a health care practitioner of some kind, an expert that can work with you and your body and tell you what kind of cleanse or detox to do, because what might work for you might be bad for me and vice versa because our bodies are different. One person might need a liver cleanse. One person might need a kidney flush. One person might need a yeast cleanse. Someone else might need a heavy metal cleanse. It's different for everyone. And you want to make sure that you go about it in the right way, because you can actually get pretty sick doing a detox if you're not taking the right amounts of minerals to remedy, revitalize your body. Or if your detoxification pathways or your lymphatic system are blocked, you’ll need to open that up first before you do other kinds of detoxes and cleanses. So always work with a naturopath. You can work with a nutritionist if that's an area that they specialize in a functional medicine practitioner, an Ayurvedic doctor, a Chinese medicine doctor, etc. That would be my greatest suggestion. 

But if you do all those things and it's not enough, then you go one layer deeper and now you're in the second layer of healing, which is the Mental layer. And that's where we look at your stress levels. How much stress are you carrying every day and what does your mindset look like? Sometimes alleviating stress makes the symptoms disappear. I definitely had that happen to me. When I first left my corporate career, I took a leave of absence from work to try to heal my body because I couldn't function at work anymore. And when I took that time off of work and removed a large source of stress from my life and started focusing more on my self-care, my symptoms just *poof* disappeared. And it was a huge awakening moment. That was the moment that made me realize, wow, you could have everything else going for you… You could have the right diet, the right exercise, all of the things that you're supposed to do to have the “healthy” lifestyle. But if you have chronic stress, it's like none of the rest even mattered. 

And everyone was suffering in their own way because stress affects everyone so differently. For some people, it shows up in the digestive issues. For others, it's connected to migraines or insomnia or anxiety or depression or autoimmune conditions, you name it. And stress is an underlying factor that really triggers a lot of those conditions to flare up. Regulating your nervous system is such an important practice, and there are a lot of different modalities that you can use for that now. 

Talk therapy is one modality that you can explore to alleviate stress and anxiety, but you can also do a lot of other things to regulate your nervous system. Yoga, breathwork, and meditation is amazing for that, which makes sense for the mental layer, right? It's calming down the mind. You could do EFT tapping - emotional freedom technique that is great for emotional healing, but also for the mental healing as well. Hypnotherapy is another thing that you can explore. There are so many different therapies that you can look into in different healing modalities that you can try that are just going to help to calm you down. And sometimes that's enough. 

The other thing that we want to look at in the Mental layer is your mindset. Are you in a growth mindset or are you fixed? Are you closed off? Because you have to look at the stories that you're telling yourself. When I was really sick, the story I had told myself was “I'm sick. I don't feel good.” When someone would ask me how I'm doing, that was my response. And one day I realized I was tired of that story. I was tired of being the sick, tired girl. So, I decided to change my story. Instead of focusing on the one part of my health that wasn't working, I started focusing on what was working, and I woke up every day grateful for my two eyes that get to see the world. Grateful for my heart that beats without me telling it to. Grateful for my two legs that carry me through this life. And when I started focusing on what was going well in my body, it gave me this reverence for my body. And I was so grateful for the miracle that this body really is for me. Everything started to change. My attitude changed. My story changed. I would tell people “I am healthy and strong. I feel good today.” and I did genuinely start feeling better. And that's when some of the most powerful healers started being introduced to me. It was the moment that I started shifting my inner story. So, ask yourself that question… what is the inner story you are telling yourself regarding the challenge that's going on in your life? And is that a story that you want to continue believing and telling yourself and everyone else? Or are you ready for a new story? Are you ready for a new possibility? Are you ready for your 2.0 version of your own life? 

Now, one layer deeper from that Mental layer, if that's not enough, is the third layer of healing, which is the Emotional layer. And that's going to be where are we storing trauma and unprocessed emotions in our body. Just because something comes up and you feel like you want to cry and you're like, “No, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna push this down. I don't I can't allow myself to feel that.” Just because we try to distract ourselves and push something down, doesn't mean it goes away. Because our emotions are energy. It carries a frequency. It is its own energy. Albert Einstein says that everything is energy and that's all there is to it. If you look at the tiniest atom and you break it down, what is it really? It's energy that's moving. So, our emotions are just energy in motion. That's what an emotion is. When you don't allow yourself to feel your emotions, the energy is still present, and it might just be buried down inside of you where it's just festering and growing and creating dis-ease. 

I have done emotional healing work and had symptoms disappear as soon as I let myself cry and release some of the grief that I had from losing several family members and three pregnancies in a short period of time in my life. I didn't realize that I was being the strong one at that time. I was holding it together for myself and for everyone else in my family. Crying doesn't come naturally to me. I'm not an easy crier. I'm resilient. Right? I'm holding it together. I'm being strong. Can you relate to that? And what I realized is how much pain was actually living inside of me was in my body. And I did several things to try to work with that. 

EFT Tapping - Emotional Freedom Technique - is a fantastic modality for you to explore. It's the combination of acupressure and positive psychology, and it helps you to rewire your brain and release emotions from the body. There's a healing modality called emotion code that is intuitive, and it helps you get to the root of what emotion is out of balance or trapped within your body that is connected to a specific issue or challenge that you're having. And then you can clear it, which is really cool. I do like that. I have also done Reiki healing for emotional healing, and that has been the most profound for me. One of my dear friends is a powerful Reiki master. She does distant healing sessions where we don't even talk on the phone. She just says, “we're starting at 8:00” and I'll get in my bed. I'll turn off the lights. I'm in the privacy of my room, and she'll give me music to listen to on my headphones. And I know the second she starts, because some emotion will wash over me, or some memory that I hadn't thought of in forever will just suddenly pop up and I'll start feeling the emotions start welling up. Instead of running away from it because I don't want to feel it - because it's too painful, too scary, which is what we always do -  I would instead surrender. And give myself permission to fully feel whatever was coming up, and I would spend the next ten minutes or so just crying my eyes out, bawling my eyes out, just releasing all of that pent up stored energy that's just been living inside of me. It's like having a release valve and just giving it the opportunity to come out. 

It was amazing. She literally pulled all of the grief that I had from losing my dad, which was the greatest loss in my life, honestly. And she pulled it out of my body. And I can tell you now that when I think of my dad, I'm not even sad anymore. I'm just feel the love because I have been able to release the pain and now, I just carry the love. And when I think of him, I smile. It makes me feel good because I've done the work to look at my shadow and give myself permission to feel it, because you have to feel it in order to heal it. 

One thing I will share with you quickly is that anytime you've had an emotional release - whether you're crying or screaming at someone, or maybe even you just took in some heavy information or heavy energy from like watching the news or something to that effect - you can release it from your body. After you cry, get up and shake your body out. Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake because you need to move the energy out of you. That's how you actually get the energy out. So, after you have the long cry, get up and physically shake. Imagine you can just dust it off your body. Dust it off. You can breathe it out by a big long inhale and exhale. Just blow it out of your body and you'll feel amazing after you release it out. That's how I like to do it. You could go for a run. You could dance. You could jump up and down. It doesn't really matter. Just as long as you physically move the body, because that's how we move the energy out. So, keep that in mind. 

Now, if you do the emotional healing work and that doesn't do the trick, you can go one layer deeper, which is our fourth layer and that is our Energetic layer. And that's really looking at whether or not your energy channels are open in your body. This is where Chinese medicine lives. Like acupuncture and Qigong, this is a way to allow your Qi, or your life force energy. In yoga we call it our prana. It allows your Qi or your prana to move throughout the body. So, the Chinese came up with a system of energy channels and meridian points that we have all over our body. And the idea is that when our life force, when our Qi is moving, flowing, we are in harmony. If there is an area in the body where the energy gets stuck, where there's a stagnation and it's not able to flow, that creates dis-ease in the body. So, this is why an acupuncturist can put one little needle in one little spot of your body, and all of a sudden, your digestive issues are gone, or your back pain has been alleviated, or suddenly you don't have a headache anymore. It's incredible. And that was because your energy channels were not open. They were blocked. So, ways you can do this certainly are with acupuncture. Acupressure. Qigong. Qigong is a wonderful modality that's part of the Chinese medicine system. And it's about using visualization and breathwork and slow movements. To move the Qi, to move the energy around the body, and to be able to take in key energy from the cosmos and from the earth, and pull that energy into your body to replenish you. It helps increase your vitality. It's a beautiful practice that is very gentle on the body, so anyone can really do it, and it's easy to follow along. So, I highly, highly recommend you check that out. Other things you can do are breathwork. There are so many different kinds of specific breathwork practices that help you move the energy. That is a wonderful way. And then there's Reiki and there's different types of energy healing as well. 

So, let's say you try all of that and it doesn't work. Now you get into that fifth final layer of healing, which is that Spiritual-Soul level. And that is what I discovered when I first connected into the Akashic Records. You see, I had already done everything for that Physical, Mental, Emotional and Energetic layer. I had tried 50 healing modalities and I did receive some legit healing miracles. I mean, my symptoms disappeared overnight more than once. But the thing was, it kept coming back again, and again, and again, and I couldn't understand why. And when I found the Akashic records that answered the question, why? Because that is what that fifth layer of healing is. It's answering the question, what created this? What circumstances happened on my soul's journey for this to even be showing up for me in my life? And it's so powerful. So, you can definitely do that in Akashic healing work for sure. You could do shamanic journeys for that as well. Sometimes plant medicine journeys can yield a similar result that other people have. And there's other types of spiritual practices that you can try as well. But the Akashic Records are the one that really gave me all of the answers that I was looking for. 

The Akashic Records are a powerful modality because you can ask a question to yourself to find out “What is the source of this? Where did this come from?” And there's really four places that it can come from. It can come from past life trauma. It can come from ancestral lineage wounds that you inherit through your family line. It can come from soul contracts to do certain things in this present lifetime that you're living in. And it can also come from karmic patterns that repeat over and over again. And when you get to the bottom of it, the beautiful part about the Akashic healing is that you can heal it by absorbing the information, the wisdom, the knowledge, the lessons that your soul was meant to learn from those experiences. And you can choose to transmute that energy. Remember, energy doesn't die, it only changes form. So, we're transmuting that energy into love. We're forgiving those situations, those people and ourselves because that's really how you let it go. And when you do the forgiveness on the level of the soul, it is powerful, my friend. And then we clear it. And the result is that the energy of your life is completely different. 

For me, that was the missing puzzle piece that I had been searching for. Those were finally the answers, and I finally uncovered why I had been suffering from that illness all of this time. It all made sense to me. I finally figured it out and it was incredible. And I have a whole podcast episode all about my journey through the Akashic Records. And you can learn a little more about my story by checking that out, but I will tell you that it is the most powerful healing modality that I have experienced and has the ability to really transform your life. I share all of these five layers - the Physical, Mental, Emotional, Energetic, and Spiritual level - so that you can explore within yourself what is a new opportunity that you can do to heal. Because if you've tried all the traditional things that are available to you up to this point and it's not enough, I want you to dig a little bit deeper. Try one of those other layers. And what I have found is that when you heal at all five of those layers and you heal and release, then the issue is complete and it never has to come back again. And I've been healthy ever since, which is such a miracle. 

And all I want for you is to feel good. And the entire purpose of my show is to be able to highlight different healing modalities so that you know that they exist, and to give you the opportunity to try something so that you can see if it works for you. The most important thing is that I never want you to accept the limitations that other people try to put on you, especially your doctor. I do believe in Western medicine very much. I have relied on medication so many times in my life. I have had five surgeries in my life. I believe in going to the doctor. I believe in doing your annual checkups, I believe in taking medicine when you need medicine, but it's not the end all, be all. It's very limited in its scope. Western medicine is only going to help you manage your symptoms. They're not looking for root causes. So, if you just want to manage your symptoms forever, then you can just stay on that path and that's okay. And there's no judgment from anybody. But if you want to actually heal so that you don't have to deal with this anymore, then that's the invitation to dive deeper, to explore fuller. To be able to look for your answers. Because I promise you, they are out there. There are so many different healing modalities, and I only shared a couple of handfuls. I have tried so many things, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of healing modalities. And I'm constantly trying more because there are so many ways to heal the body, my friend, and healing is your birthright. Remember that. So, try out these five layers of healing. I hope you feel inspired to try something new, and I'll look forward to seeing you all next time. 

Thank you so much for joining me on healed with Nicole Nixdorf. If today's episode inspired you, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who's on a healing journey too. And be sure to follow me on Instagram @NicoleMixdorf for more inspiration and healing tools. To find out about my programs, head over to my website https://nicolemixdorf.com.  Remember, you have the power within you to create a life balance, vitality, and joy. Until next time, stay grounded, stay open and stay HEALED.