Whole Spectrum Healing

You have to show up for your healing: physically, emotionally, and spiritually/energetically. Healing is a multi-faceted thing. We need to address it from all angles to get the results we’re looking for. In this post, I’m going to expand on why this is so important.

I must admit that in my own journey, I have spent lots of time in the past focused mostly on energetic/shamanic healing work, hoping that would be enough. That work is hugely important, but over the years I have learned how important it is to also do physical work to create true healing and embodiment.

In other words, we can’t forget the physical life changes we must make in order for things to change. I bring this into my work now: while most of my sessions focus primarily on the emotional, energetic and spiritual aspects of healing, I talk a lot about taking physical steps to integrate the energetic work we do. In this way, we include all layers of healing in our work.

Here’s a recent example from my journey: I have had “weak”, possibly hyper-mobile wrists my whole life. I always used to get sore in my wrists and thumbs if I used them too much, such as from a lot of typing or even just holding my phone.

Earlier this year I signed up for Ma School (if you want to learn more about what this training is you can take a look here: https://maschool.co/) to become a Womb Continuum Care practitioner. This is a bodywork training, where we are learning how to align the uterus properly in the body and support overall physiological function.

When I was accepted into the program, I had a niggling fear about how my wrists and thumbs would hold up when I started learning and then offering bodywork. I told myself that I’d figure it out because I wanted to be in this training. So I spent time working with the energy field of my body, with fears around pain and injury. Eventually, I felt cleared of those fears but my wrists still hurt. Well there’s nothing else I can do, I thought. I’ll just have sore wrists and thumbs.

Then, in one of the first teaching calls, our teachers told us: you have to be STRONG to do this work. It takes muscle. You need to be training and building muscle now and continually as you learn and offer this work.

Again I felt the fear come back in. What about my wrists? They were still sore even after years of weightlifting and grip strength training.

I felt the urge to approach this within my comfort zone: perhaps I needed to dive deeper into the energetics around my wrists? Or maybe there just wasn’t anything to do? Then, I snapped myself out of it. I have spent three years building strength in the gym. In that time I’ve also completely restructured my body, losing fat and gaining muscle. I’m strong, and I’ve learned to put in the physical work to change what I want to change. My strength journey has also necessitated quite a bit of energetic work, working through fears around safety, health, and weight loss. But none of that work would have been enough without taking physical steps as well.

So I knew I needed to approach my wrist/thumb pain differently. I asked my boyfriend, who is a personal trainer, to program forearm and wrist strengthening exercises into my plan. I needed to train my wrists and thumbs to be stronger. I’d done whatever energy work I had to do there, now I needed to get serious about embodying it.

He put together a set of four specific exercises that I started incorporating into my routine weekly, along with increasing the weight I use in other compound lifts to strengthen my grip further. I’ve been doing this for about four months now. My wrist/thumb pain is 95% gone. The only times I get any pain there are when I sleep weirdly on one hand, which rarely happens.

For so long I believed I had painful, likely hyper mobile wrists, that was how my body was made and I’d just have some discomfort there. I had taken this for granted as a truth about myself. However, something I learned this year is that one of the greatest things we can do for hyper mobile bodies is make them stronger. I suspect I have some degree of hyper-mobility in several other joints, and I have used strength training to minimize pain in those joints as well. Working with my wrists to strengthen them is no different.

I have now significantly increased the weight I use for my forearm/wrist training exercises. Beyond the result of no more pain, I also have a much stronger grip and I am preparing for the first Ma School hands on training in two weeks without any fear about if my wrists will get too sore for me to do the work properly.

Not because I had more energy work to do. Because I did my physical embodiment work.

It can be very easy to decide “this is how things are”. It can be easy to forget that what’s going on in our bodies is both energetic AND physical. We must address both aspects for true healing and health.

This is why I am in Ma School. I have spent years learning to work with the womb and body as a whole energetically. I want to understand how to better work with the physical now. With this training, I will be able to offer completely well-rounded womb-centered care, from the energetic and spiritual, to the physical and physiological.

In person hands-on Womb Continuum Care sessions with me will be available from December on. I will be available in the Des Moines, IA and Kansas City area from December 2025 through the first few months of 2026, and I will be offering sessions in Phoenix, AZ at the end of January 2026. Sign up information is coming soon, but if you’d like to book sessions in advance, please send me an email: shannon@healingintuitively.com.