322 Holly Worton ~ How Much is Too Much Healing? Is There a Limit?

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! As is often the case, this week’s topic is about something that’s been on my mind lately, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you. I doubt I’m the only person who ever wonders this! I have received a lot of healing in the past month and a half, ever since a really deep healing retreat that I went on. However, this healing was deceptively “gentle” (yet deep), and since I haven’t been doing any mindset work with myself, I didn’t realize how much healing I was actually doing.

Healing is change, and change can be stressful. We’re stepping into a new version of ourselves, and sometimes into a new identity. This requires energy, and it requires downtime to integrate the healing and the changes.

Sometimes we need to take a look at all the inner work that we do and ask ourselves: is it too much? Do we need to press pause for a while? How much is too much?

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

Is it possible to do too much healing and inner work?
How to know how much is too much healing for YOU
How to find the right balance for you (including the right therapies at the right time, and at the right frequency)
What to do when you’ve reached your saturation point
How to create new habits for healing moving forward

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to Into The Wood podcast, episode 322. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

Today I am going to talk about something that has been on my mind lately, as is often the case with these episodes. So I wanted to share my thoughts with you because I doubt I am the only person who ever wonders this, or struggles with this, or has this issue going on. So the topic is: is it possible to do too much healing and inner work? I think it is, I think I need to learn to be more balanced with the work that I do. So hopefully in this episode I am going to help you find the right balance for you. So how to know when you have too much, how to know how much is too much, and how to find the right therapies and types of inner works and frequencies that are right for you? So I hope you find this episode interesting and useful and let’s get into this episode.

So, this is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately because I mentioned kind of cryptically a few weeks ago I went on this healing retreat, and that was the second week of August, second weekend of August, 9-11 August. I went on this healing retreat, it was really, really, intense so much so that it took me most of the next week to recover from it – not recover from it that sounds terrible – to integrate the healing and I am probably still integrating the healing. I needed to take about five days off and just sit in bed and read and rest and relax and eat — I found it difficult to fast, so instead of doing my normal one meal a day fasting I was eating twice a day — and drinking lots of water and taking it easy so that I could integrate the bulk of that healing. Again, it was such a deep healing that I think it will be something I will be integrating for the next few months. But, it did take me a good five days of downtime, of integration time and rest to really get back into things. After that, I wanted something relaxing and the following week I decided to have a reiki session. Reiki is one of those therapies, it is the first thing that I ever trained in years and years ago, that I think it is easy to underestimate, because it is nice, you just kind of lie there and you receive the energy and it is really nice and gentle, but it is also healing and it is also shifting things and it is also, I think, really deep. So I think that reiki is one of those things that, for me at least, easy to underestimate. It is healing, it is energy work and it is not just a walk in the park, I think stuff like that does also require its integration time, but I don’t always recognise that.

Then the following week I thought it would be a great idea to start doing and receiving cranial sacral therapy, so I have had sessions in that and that is another thing, it is so gentle, it is so subtle, but I know that it is going really, really, deep. So with the exception of the week when I walked the South Downs Way, I have had four weekly sessions of cranial sacral therapy which I am telling you, I think it is really easy to underestimate this stuff. I feel like it goes really, really, deep and I know that because I am not really functional for the rest of the day after I have cranial sacral, so I will try to give myself an hour’s worth of rest, kind of sit in bed and read afterwards, and give myself time to integrate, but I find it really difficult to work the rest of the day. So, I am kind of learning how to fit that therapy into the rest of my day and plan, if I know I have got certain things to do in the week, I will plan the bulk of my work when I am not receiving healing. So I have had to rearrange things because I am learning that even the gentle stuff requires its integration time and that should be common sense, but I need to remind myself to that, so I am saying it out loud to remind you as well.

So within this last month or so, I also walked the South Downs Way which I find to be really restorative, loads of relaxation and mindfulness and just being present in the moment and putting one step in front of the other and, this isn’t exactly healing, it is walking 100 plus miles. The trail itself is 100 miles and of course you have got to walk a mile or so off the trail in the afternoon to get to where you are staying, back onto the trail in the morning so there is a physical effort that is going on there. So even though mentally it is very restorative and very healing and very relaxing, it is a lot of work physically to walk nine days in a row. And I think I underestimate that especially as I had such an easy going time of it on the South Downs way this year, I had two very tiny blisters that I don’t even count, because I didn’t have to put Compeed on them, they healed very quickly, it was just easy compared to my previous experience. Again, I think that is something I tend to underestimate, and it required some rest and relaxation before getting back into my normal physical activity which I think I haven’t really fully gotten back to. Because, last weekend, I was on my plant-spirit-healing-apprenticeship and we were working with white pine to work with ancestral healing and I had never done, I had only had one session of ancestral healing before, and that was massively life changing, but this was working with all of our ancestors. We learned this really awesome way of working with our ancestors, to work with the ancestors that haven’t yet crossed into the light, that haven’t passed on, and drumming them through the seven directions to help them cross into the light. It was huge, it was exhausting, and it took me a while to recover from that. So this week has been a bit of recovery from that and then of course I did cranial sacral again yesterday and that was rough, it wasn’t rough, it was gentle, it was relaxing but I required integration for that.

So the point of this is that I have been doing a lot of stuff in the last month and a half, and I feel like I haven’t given myself enough integration time, and the reason I know that is because I feel like I haven’t gotten back on track with life. I have been skipping a lot of my kickboxing classes, because I haven’t had enough energy to go to the group classes. I have been doing my private classes that I do once a week, and I have been to some classes here and there but the last couple of weeks, since my South Downs Way, I haven’t been to a group class because I just couldn’t’, I didn’t have the energy and I know what it is like when I don’t have the energy — it is not like going out for a run or going out for a hike when you are sparring with other people and my energy is low that is when I get punched in the face because I drop my guard and I don’t perform well. It is not the same for me at least from my perspective as other kinds of exercise where you can more easily just stop and not get injured.

So I feel like all of the healing and inner work I do has been a lot. So since that retreat that I did, I really felt like I didn’t have the need to do anymore mindset work. So I have been doing the PSYCH-K® for my Patreon and I have been doing the HEW® work for my Patreon — so all the Patreon members receiving their normal done-for-you mindset work and healing, but I haven’t felt the need to do any of that for myself. I think there was a time when I was compulsively doing mindset work and PSYCH-K® work to where I would be working in the day and I would feel a block, or I would feel stuck on something and I would just stop everything and do a bunch of balancing. And I think that was great and I think that served me, but I just haven’t been feeling the need for that since I did that retreat in August. I have been feeling really kind of whole, however I have had that need for the cranial sacral and the reiki and other types of healing, kind of more energy healing, and gentle healing, although gentle I don’t know if I should use that word, relaxing healing, because it goes deep.

So, I have been feeling the need for different kinds of healing, but I have still been pretty full on with it and I think it has been too much, and I say that, again, because it has been disrupting other things that are really important to me, like kickboxing. So that to me has been a sign that my healing work and my inner work has been interfering with things that are high priority to me. I am hopefully on track to get my blackbelt next year so I really feel like I can’t drop the ball between now and next summer with my kickboxing, I really want to put in the effort, put in the time, and improve so that I can be at the level I need to be at for the summer course next year. So, that’s a very important goal for me, it is a very important priority for me and right now the healing work that I am doing has been interfering with that. So I think that has been a massive kind of red flag for me that has made me stop and realise what I have been doing and realise that the healing that I have been doing is deeper than I thought and requires more integration time than I thought.

So what I am doing about that? I have another one of those super-deep retreats booked for the end of the year that I am actually, really, really, looking forward to, I really want to continue doing that type of work. And I do have a cranial sacral session for next week, but after that I think I am going to skip to every other week, or longer, I don’t know. What I have done is intentionally blocked out the rest of that day in my calendar to do other self-care things to allow for that integration time for the cranial sacral. So I have rearranged my schedule next week to allow for that rather than expecting myself to get on with my day and do my emails and do my normal business and work tasks after having such a deep healing session. So that is how I have changed things up, and again, lay off all this intense healing and really give myself time for integration, because the plant-spirit-apprenticeship is once a month and I have got two more weekends of that, one in October, one in November, and I know that is going to be two weekends of deep healing. So, I have got that stuff planned, it is not something that I want to cancel because I want to finish the apprenticeship, so I need to work the rest of my life around that including my healing and inner work.

So that was very long-winded and that was a lot about me and my story and my experience and the reason I always talk about my stuff is not because I love talking about myself but because for me I find it really useful to hear other people’s stories and what they have learned from their experiences and how that can help me. So that is why I share my stuff, both the good stuff and the challenges because I hope this will help you and serve you in your life and in your healing. Now, if you are listening to this podcast I assume that you are someone who is in to personal development and healing and inner work and mindset work and I know that because when I get feedback from people who listen to the show, I can see that they are that kind of person and I know that is not going to apply to everyone but most of you probably are. So if healing and personal development is a high priority for you it is possible that you have reached this point of not healing burnout, because I don’t feel like I am burned out, but I do feel like I have reached a saturation point with my healing work and inner work and I need to scale it back and dial it back a little bit.

So enough about me, let’s talk about you, is it possible to do too much inner work and healing work? I think, yes, but I think it is important to clarify what I mean by too much. Healing and inner work is very important to me and I intend to spend the rest of my life working with myself and healing not just stuff from this life but from previous live and healing ancestral stuff, that is the path that I am walking and that is the path that is important to me. This is a high priority for me in my life, it is possibly number one priority of all the different segments in the wheel of life. So, it is something that I will continue to do, it is not like: oh I have reached my saturation point and that is it, I am not doing anymore. It is not like I have done too much, and I need to stop for the rest of my life. What I think that I need to do, what I believe that I need to do, is just scale back the intensity and the frequency and allow myself more integration time.

Now I have done a podcast episode on allowing integration from healing and that was episode 279, which was titled: Downtime, are you getting it? And that was about, that was probably the first moment that I noticed that I was not getting enough integration time for my healing. And that episode went live, that was last year, so this is a topic that I was already thinking about last year. So, for you, are you getting enough integration time and downtime from the healing that you are doing? Do you feel like you are saturated, and you have been doing too much? Do you feel like you have got healing burnout? Do you feel like your energy levels have dropped? That to me is a sign, when I don’t have enough energy to do physical stuff like kickboxing or exercise because I have been doing too much healing. Do you feel like you are tired all the time but yet you have been getting enough sleep? Or maybe you have been feeling like you are needing more sleep to feel good? I have definitely been paying attention to my sleep lately, I got an Oura ring for my birthday this year, it is another one of those tracker devices like a Fitbit, but it is more focussed on sleep. It measures your heartrate and your body temperature, and it gives you really useful sleep data, so I will link to that in the show notes. But the point of that is that I have noticed that I have been needing more sleep lately. I used to be able to get by on seven hours, but I really, really, need eight hours of sleep lately to feel like a functional and focussed human being. So that’s another question to ask yourself.

How do you feel? Do you feel balanced? Do you feel like things are changing too much, changing too fast? Because another result of course of this healing and inner work is that we are changing, we are healing ourselves, we are changing, we are shifting, we are stepping into a new version of ourselves, we are peeling off the layers of crap, possibly stepping into new identities and that is something that I talked about a lot last year, because I felt like I was shifting a lot. And that can be overwhelming, so if you feel like you have been changing yourself through healing work, and inner work, and you have been making so many changes that you are like: who the heck am I? I don’t even know…I have changed so much; I don’t know who I am. That, I think is another sign to maybe stop, integrate the work that you are doing and give yourself a break before moving on and doing more inner work. Like I said, I was almost compulsively doing mindset work for a while and I didn’t see that at the time, I was just really into it, and you know that I love it, so I am going to continue to do it, but I really needed a break from that. And I think that was because I was making so many changes within myself that I needed to just stop and integrate all of the work that I had done. Change can be stressful and don’t underestimate the stress that comes from the changes from doing healing work, and inner work and mindset work, that’s why we need this integration time.

So change takes energy and if you don’t have the energy to do other things in your life that are a priority maybe that’s because you have been doing so much inner work and the energy has been going towards that. So as I said, look at how all this inner work and healing that you have been doing is effecting the rest of your life. Have you had to cancel things in order to recover from your healing? Have you had to let go of hobbies, classes, workshops, things that are important to you? Have you had to quit exercising or put a hold on your exercising? And where did those activities sit within your list of priorities within your life and I said that healing is the number one priority in my life, not just healing but inner work and personal development, that’s quite possibly my number one priority but also physical health and wellbeing, exercise, fitness. That’s also super, super, important to me, my kickboxing is also really important to me. So when I see that I have to cancel these things to recover from my healing, that is a sign for me that I need to hold back.

So what are the things that are high priority for you, that you have been having to put off or cancel because you need more time to integrate. And I also think it is important to know where is healing on your list of priorities? Is it number one for you, number two, number three? Or is it lower down? Look at the wheel of life, which I will link to in the show notes, and look at where personal development or inner work ranks compared to family, friends, social life, spirituality, relationships, business, career, money, finances, all that stuff and look at where healing sits on that list, how big a priority is it for you? Because if you have been doing tons of healing work, and it is really not as important to you as other stuff in your life, either you need to re-evaluate where healing work sits in your list of priorities, or you need to dial it back and really make those other things a priority. So, those are some ways that you can tell whether you have had too much, whether you need to dial it back a little bit, whether you need to press pause and give yourself more time to integrate the healing you have already done before you start doing other healings.

So that leads me to the question: how do you recover from this – I don’t want to say healing burnout, but how do you give yourself more time to integrate? So for me, the first thing is to press pause, not do more healing until you feel like you are in a more balanced place. So press pause on the healing and inner work, maybe make a list of the things that you want to do when you start back up again, but really get to know yourself and I have recently done a series of three episodes on self-knowledge: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? But really stop and get to know yourself. And again if you are done a lot healing work you might not know who you are right now, because you have peeled off a lot of layers of crap and you are more to the core, the centre of yourself, your true authentic self, but you don’t know quite who that is, and you need to get to know yourself. I will link to those episodes in the show notes but maybe you need to go through and do some of that who am I work. And I have got a lot of blog posts on that topic as well that can help you and all of those podcast episodes now have downloadable transcripts, those are episodes: 315, 316 and 317, those three all really go together well. So get to know yourself again, get to know who you are today, because who you are today after all this healing is different from, who you were last month, last year, five years ago. We are always constantly changing but if we are really dedicated to this inner work we might be changing more than the average person, so I think it is good to check in with ourselves and do that self-knowledge work on a regular basis.

So know yourself, know who you are now, today, and just pay attention, maybe track your energy levels, and your stress levels, and your activity levels. So maybe have a page in your journal or do it on your calendar, you can do it on paper, you can do it on the computer, you can do it wherever, but track your energy levels. So track all the healing you have been doing for the past month or few months. And then, maybe start tracking each day what your energy levels are like on a scale of 1-10 and also make note of things that maybe have had to cancel because your energy levels are low. And I think that will really help you get a visual of how long it takes you to recover. So I know now, when I block out time for recovery from an integration from healing, I always block that out in my calendar, so I know, which is how I know that it took me five days to recover and integrate from the retreat in August. And how many hours it takes me, or how many hours I give myself to integrate after different sessions, so that could be useful as well to block out that time in your calendar so that you can see visually how long – obviously not how long it has taken you because it takes you longer than just the time you give yourself — but it will give you a visual of how much time you gave yourself to integrate and not do anything and really take it easy.

So track your energy levels and stress levels and how long you give yourself to integrate each type of healing and then look at how that fits into the rest of your life. Look at how to create a balance with the activities and the rest of your life and that will help you find the right therapies for you at the right times and the right frequencies of those therapies. So that retreat that I did I am probably not going to want to do that more than two or three times a year just because I think that is going to require a lot of integration time. Before I went on that retreat I was thinking: oh, this might be something I want to do quarterly, but I think that is too frequent for me, I am thinking twice, maybe three times a year. Cranial sacral, I don’t know, I am going to have to play with that, but I am thinking once a week is probably too much just because of how difficult it is to fit into my schedule especially for the next month which is really, really, busy.

So those are my examples and I hope that helps you to see how to balance inner work and therapy and healing and mindset work with the rest of your life because this is just one piece of our lives. Even if we are really, really, into this we have got other stuff going on and we need to function. So going back to my initial question, which was: how to know how much is too much healing? To me there are two main answers for that: 1) when it interferes with other things that are high priorities in your life and 2) when you are non-functional. If you are doing so much healing that you just can’t function in your regular life with all of the other things that are important for you and that you have to get done, that is also a sign that it is too much.

So, I would love to hear from you, do you ever feel like you have gotten to a point of healing burnout or too much healing or too much inner work and how did you know and what have you done to recover from that? For me it is all about giving myself permission and this is really hard for me, giving myself permission to take time off and integrate. So, is that something that you find easy? Giving yourself permission to integrate after the healing? Please let me know I would love to hear from you and I would love to share some people’s stories on a future episode because I think this is something that we don’t look at enough, and we don’t talk about enough and as always before I do one of these episodes, I google the topic to see what other people are saying on the topic and see if I agree with them or not, what kinds of things I want to take into consideration when I talk about this topic and I couldn’t find that much! I found one blog post on highly sensitive people and how to deal with recovery from healing and integration from healing but that was about it, I did not find much information on this topic so please share your stories from me, I would love to hear from you. You can email me: [email protected] or get in touch online and send me a message there and share your story: how much is too much healing? How did you know? How did your recover? And as always, I would love for you to join me on Patreon, I know I just talked about too much healing, but, I would like to invite you to join me there, depending on the tier that you sign up at you can get done-for-you HEW® or PSYCH-K® mindset work. So I would love for you to join me there, membership starts at just $1 a month and you get exclusive access to stuff that I don’t share anywhere else including this done-for-you mindset and energy-healing work.

So, that’s all for now, next week’s episode is probably going to be, finally, an episode with Joanna Hennon, we are all back from summer and getting back to normal rhythms and we have some time booked in this week to do the episode so hopefully that will be next week’s episode. I think we are going to talk about more of the self-knowledge stuff because I have talked a lot about it with you and I have shared my perspective with you, but I would really like to have this conversation with someone else, so I am hopefully going to do it with Joanna and Jo Casey in the future. So that’s it for now, thank you so much for listening and remember to visit: https://www.hollyworton.com/322 for the show notes on this episode, thank you so much.