The Difference Between Healing
and Leadership
The world cannot keep waiting for wounded healers to get out of your own way
Originally published February 27, 2026 • Updated September 10, 2026
Last year I got sick again. Although it’s always been hard to tell where the different illnesses end and begin. Their overlapping fabrics woven together like a quilt that smothers you instead of keeping you warm. Every symptom and set of worries seemingly bound together in some unsolvable tesseract that requires advanced degrees to crack open.
My chronic illness is mostly invisible on the outside. It shape shifts. Hides, evolves, and transforms. Using my thoughts and stress hormones as fuel. Anxiety, fear, and obsession play in a symphony of discordant symptoms that loop and twang inside my body like the worst 4th grade orchestra you’ve ever heard.
I am a somaticizer with a hypersensitive nervous system. Meaning I feel things deeply in the body. And my body overreacts. Sensory data comes in and becomes corrupted. The channels between the gut/brain are compromised, like messages getting intercepted and coded badly. The normal pathways of safety, non-existent. I have paradoxical reactions to almost everything that is supposed to make you feel chill.
What gives others a respite sends me into spiral. This is why I don’t do breathwork, cold plunges, vision quest, extreme fasting, or other discipline focused spiritual practices that use force or stress as the mechanism for transformation. This is why my medicine work is soft and meandering.
A System Raised On Alert
I’ve spent most of my life in fight, flight, or freeze. Sympathetic hypervigilance on guard for any perceived threat. Crashing out after running too hard in the danger zone.
This is how and why I became an addict. Attempts to soothe and calm my overloaded system by any available means. To manage my feelings and sensitivity by blunting and numbing. And when I finally got sober, it got way worse.
Spending thousands of dollars and getting nowhere with countless doctors, specialists, tests, and diagnoses created a desperate willingness to open to new ideas and beliefs. That’s when I found TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome) aka The Mindbody Syndrome.
Essentially, this is a protective state where your brain creates symptoms to keep you safe from perceived danger. Stress illness created as a distraction from trauma. Taking your attention away from overwhelming feelings that your subconscious deems too dangerous. The more attention you pay to diagnosing and solving yourself, the louder and more persistent your illness will become. And boy, does the mind like to get creative.
I learned everything I could about the connection between energy, emotions, thoughts, and illness in the body. I healed myself from severe chronic pain, addiction, and dozens of other symptoms. For over 10 years.
The Healers Are Not Alright
The Healers Are Not Alright
Related Podcast Episode
EP 164 | THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HEALING AND LEADERSHIP
Turn Insight into an Embodied Way of Life
I offer coaching, plant medicine guidance, psychedelic integration, and ceremonial retreats and events.