Creating a Multi-dimensional Approach to Healing

Listen to the podcast or watch the video of the full interview now at: https://understandingautoimmune.com/naeem

Dr. Nauman Naeem about his passion for improving lives by changing the way we look at and create healing outcomes. As a pulmonary and critical care specialist, caring for tens of thousands of chronically and critically ill patients over his career, he noticed that the majority of patients do not heal and remain trapped in the paradigm of chronic disease.

Motivated to dive deeper into the roots of true healing, he made it his mission to understand human behavior and how we achieve our highest potential. To achieve this, he pursued a thorough study of ancient healing traditions, the psychology of healing, consciousness, and metaphysics which has culminated in his popular book ‘Healing From The Inside Out: Overcome Chronic Disease and Radically Change Your Life.’

“…we are all connected at the deepest level and we have to embody that connection if we truly want to solidify our intention and get on the path to healing.”

In this episode of The Autoimmune Hour, Dr. Naeem shares that there is more to healing than the physical body

Enjoy this informative Q&A clip from the show transcript. Get the complete transcript at https://understandingautoimmune.com/transcribe-tribe

SHARON SAYLER:  Dr. Naeem, I’d like to talk about some of the things you’ve discovered that get us out of those stories we tell our self including your concept of there is “No such thing as a saying “Yes!”

NAEEM:  Emotion is a huge area, which a few of us understand. Let me try to do it some justice here. Emotions, I believe, are how our lower self communicates with our higher self and it is the experience that our true nature has in this life on earth. That is what emotion is.

In our lifetime, there is a whole spectrum that we can experience all the way from feeling despair and desolation to ecstasy and everything in between.

When we get negative emotions ─ sadness, grief, anger, jealousy, whatever ─ it causes pain and then because we don’t want to feel that pain, we tend to repress that emotion especially if it’s around traumatic event in our lives.

And the fact is that when you suppress or repress that pain, over time, that pain becomes suffering. So our emotions are meant to be felt and experienced fully and thoroughly.

Now, for someone who has dealt with something in their past or recently, this is a difficult concept because I, myself, have had tragedies that I’ve dealt with ─ loss of love ones and whatnot.

And the thing is that just by virtue of being human, we are going to experience pain. Pain is unavoidable. If you think you’re going to live your life without pain, then you’re on the wrong planet and the wrong existence. We’re all going to experience pain.

The issue is not pain; the issue is suffering. Whatever emotions we experience, we are meant to feel them fully and thoroughly right through their core in order to release them and get to the core of that emotion which is a place of inner peace.

And I use a metaphor in my book. A negative emotion is like a hurricane. A hurricane has this huge onslaught and you’re buffeted and you’re blown and it just feels like the whole world is going to end.

But if you are able to bear the brunt of that storm until you get to the eye of the hurricane, what’s at the eye of a hurricane?

It’s calm. It’s peaceful. It’s a moment of calm and peace. That’s what is at the eye of the hurricane.

I use that metaphor to describe an emotion. Once you are able to burn through your emotions and allow them to run their course, you get to this place of inner peace.

This can be true of positive emotions as well. Sometimes, we have milestones that we achieve. We may feel that we don’t deserve them. Or we’re being complimented for something and we feel we don’t deserve it.

It can be true of positive emotions as well. People can repress positive emotions because they feel that they don’t deserve something or they don’t deserve that compliment; or whatever they’ve achieved, they haven’t earned it.

It can work both ways.

The point I’m trying to make is that we need to experience our emotions fully and thoroughly. I believe that suppression or repression of emotions has a lot to do with a lot of the chronic pain that people experience because studies have shown that people with chronic pain, if you test them and try to find the source of that pain, in eighty percent of those people, you’re not going to find anything that is causing the pain.

It’s documented in medical literature that eighty percent of chronic pain is actually not physical. It lies somewhere else. And I believe that emotion is a huge part of that.

SHARON:  This is the science of Sharon. Eighteen months into my condition, when I started exploring emotions and things from my past and in the current process, I did notice a bump up in how I was feeling physically. And that, to me, was enough to keep me going along exploring the emotional/physical line.

That’s why I love bringing it on The Autoimmune Hour because, for me, the transition from here to there was so quick and so high. That’s why I also love when you said, “Healing is not linear.”

NAEEM:  Right! It is not linear because there are so many aspects. And I think this would be a good time to just to share my definition of healing because I usually start out that way but we haven’t gotten there.

When I talk about healing, I’m not talking about a cure because when you talk about cure, a cure is a specific endpoint at the level of the physical body.

When you look at the word “healing,” the root of the word is “whole.” Healing is to become whole. What it means to me is to integrate all the aspects of who you are ─ physical, mental, emotional, vibrational (with “vibration,” I mean energy), and spiritual ─ and to cultivate and integrate all those different aspects of who you are at the highest level.

So when you said that healing is not linear, it is because we are multi-faceted beings. We are multi-dimensional beings. We have to integrate all those aspects of who we are, and it’s not a linear process.

SHARON:  I’m glad you brought that up. I remember about eighteen months into the experience, I was doing so well that I actually started tapering off of all the medications and now I’m off all medications.

But I remember the doctors at that time wagging their fingers and saying, “But, Sharon, you’re not cured.” And I said, “I feel great. I don’t care if you call it ‘cured’ or not.”

That wasn’t the point of this process. The point was to optimize as much as I could.

One other thing I’d like to talk to you about since we’re talking about healing right now is the idea of your nine-part healing process. Let’s go over ‘Intentions’ as I think that is critically important too.

NAEEM:  It all starts with intention. I think intention is healing’s most critical aspect. When I talk about intention, in my experience working with patients, I have found that the majority of patients have no intention of healing.

That may sound surprising but we’ve already talked about the many reasons why someone has no vested interest in healing. It may be that the story that they’ve created around the illness is perpetuating the story. They’re getting some secondary gain.

So it all has to start with intention. And what I have found in my experience is that there are two very crucial aspects to grounding that intention to heal. And that is what I call your “powerful why” and “connection.”

What I mean by “powerful why” is having a greater calling, having a greater meaning to your life. And I don’t necessarily mean “purpose” because I believe that we all have the same purpose. We are all here to awaken to the true nature of who we are and to express that in our lives here on this planet. We all have that same purpose.

But the way that is expressed is our greater calling, our powerful why, the meaning to our life.

So I encourage everyone to ask those questions to try to discover what your powerful why is, your greater reason for being. And it doesn’t always have to do with what you’re doing right now in terms of your career or your job.

You may have no idea what it is. But you have to start somewhere in exploring your powerful why.

And then, I have a series of questions and processes that I take the reader through to try to get to the root of that. It’s not something that necessarily will happen overnight but through a process.

And then, there’s connection because healing doesn’t happen in isolation. We are not isolated beings. We are connected to everyone and everything around us because, in our essence, we are energy. Everything is energy in its essence.

If you look at the fundamental particles of matter, the atom, and you look at the subatomic particles ─ protons, neutrons, and electrons ─ and you break them down into their subatomic particles, quantum mechanics tells us that 99.9999… ─ twelve nines ─ percent of those subatomic particles are empty space and the rest is matter.

So this appearance of us as physical beings and everything that we see around us is an illusion of sorts because it’s really empty space but we are seeing it as matter.

What I’m trying to get at is that empty space is a vibrational frequency and that is something that is common to all living and nonliving things ─ all matter ─ so we are all connected at the deepest level and we have to embody that connection if we truly want to solidify our intention and get on the path to healing.

That’s the intention piece of that.

SHARON:  It’s fascinating to me that you said that most of the patients don’t come in with an intention. That explains a lot to me why when I would go into a doctor’s office and I would make it very clear that my intention is to overcome autoimmune that it will no longer be part of my life, I found that, in some cases, it was a little hard to convince other people that I was seeing my reality and not their reality like “Get real, Sharon! This is your life now” and I’m like, “No, that’s not my life.”

Thank you, Dr. Naeem, for sharing your expertise and wisdom with us today.

And thank you for joining us and being part of our interviews, and these transcript clips. We hope you enjoy them and join us every Friday night at 7PM ET for a new show and until our next adventure!

In joy!

Sharon

DISCLAIMER: The information provided on UnderstandingAutoimmune.c om, The Autoimmune Show, or The Autoimmune Hour is for educational purposes only. Seek sound professional advice. Sharon Sayler is not a medical doctor or medical professional. We are talking about other people’s research and our own anecdotal experiences including those of and with clients, listeners, and friends.