When Healing Isn’t About Pushing Harder: How I Discovered the Power of a Holistic Approach

I love when people say out loud what they think.

Being raw.

Being themselves but also vulnerable.

I am currently doing a little market research to help me with a future project. I posted it in a few groups I am in to get a broader audience. But I also mentioned that if the following resonate, I’d love to have their input:

1. My wellbeing is important to me but can be improved.

2. I feel like I’m going round in circles when I want to address specific wellbeing issues.

3. I’ve tried many different things but my wellbeing doesn’t seem to improve.

One person felt the need to share their view on holistic solutions and commented:

“I prefer the physical approach to the gentle holistic, as real men need something demanding and heavy as therapy for welcomed success.”

I asked what comes to mind when they hear the word “holistic” – whether it sounds “woo woo” or “spiritual.” Maybe I should have added “talking therapy.”

Their answer surprised me. For them, “woo woo” went away at three years old. I can only imagine what that means. They saw “holistic” as therapy and said they had only partial success with it in the past.

I love this kind of insight because it represents so much of what I’ve come across since completing my Vitametik practitioner course.

Holistic is indeed therapy, but it is more than talking therapy. An approach becomes holistic when we don’t just focus on the symptom but also consider the whole body and mind, lifestyle, environment and emotions. Some of those we can control and others we can’t.

You could even turn it around and say that if you are working out to gain muscle mass and start looking at your nutrition to fuel your body properly (because muscles need fuel to grow), and also think about the right amount of rest after a workout, not just training your biceps, then your workout is holistic. And I know I have probably missed a few points here.

When clients come to me, they usually have some discomfort in their body. But upon further questioning, it is rarely an injury to that area that caused it. In nine out of ten cases, the cause of the discomfort is somewhere else in their body, routines or lifestyle. I tend to say it is stress, but honestly stress is so broad and again, not just a head thing.

Stress is a natural response, usually to a dangerous situation. It helps you overcome that situation.

How?

By increasing your attention or focus.

By increasing muscle tension.

By increasing heart rate and blood pressure.

By increasing breathing rate.

By changing hormone levels.

But also by reducing the need to sleep, feelings of hunger, and general digestion.

The definition of stress is tension. The term “stress” was first used in engineering to describe the tension applied to materials before it entered the psychology world.

Think about having an injury to your left knee.

What happens in and to your body?

You feel pain from the actual injury = stress response.

You compensate to relieve the injured knee, shifting your whole body weight to the right side = increased tension through the ankle, knee, hip and even upper body = stress response.

Over time, while your left knee heals, you hold this increased muscle tension to keep your body lopsided in support. Your body accepts this because it wants to heal. If we don’t actively correct it, we often develop habits to walk or sit lopsided or twisted. It becomes chronic stress held in the body.

Yes, treating the injured knee will help reduce all of the above.

But what if we start to experience pain in the hip, or the ankle on the right side? Suddenly, we’re wondering why we hurt somewhere new. And we can’t necessarily heal it because we don’t know the root cause.

So many of my clients come with discomfort they have carried for a long time, and in most cases they cannot pinpoint the cause.

This is why a holistic approach is so important.

And I would like to tell you my own story, as it is an almost perfect example of this, to explain why we need a holistic approach and not just a focus on the single symptom.

When I was 13 years old, I started to have headaches. Daily headaches. Some days they were worse, others not so much, but always there. My whole head felt as if it had something tight around it, or a balloon was being blown up inside my skull. It just hurt everywhere.

We saw my GP.

He did some blood tests and assumed that since I was a teenager, it must be a vitamin deficiency, and more precisely, Vitamin B12, which now looking back, I can’t find any real link to headaches.

I took the supplements for four weeks but nothing changed, so I was sent for massages and fango treatment. I didn’t like the massages but always looked forward to the fango, a heat therapy with mud from thermal springs.

Neither made a difference though.

Then came more therapies: physio, manual therapy, lymph drainage. I had EEGs, MRI scans of my brain and neck, visits to the ophthalmologist.

Eventually I was referred to a neurologist who was also a psychiatrist. I was given more and more painkillers and asked to keep a headache diary, but since the pain was constant, it was just repetition.

After two years of living with daily headaches, I learned about Vitametik. During my first appointment, I was explained how stress, muscle tension and spinal alignment are linked, and how stress, even from injuries or accidents, can cause pelvic imbalance.

This can then show as headaches, or hip pain, or back pain, or [insert body part here] pain.

Vitametik is a holistic relaxation technique but helps my client beyond relaxation.

Everyone’s body is different and will show discomfort from chronic muscle tension differently, but they all show a leg length difference.

What was different with this therapy was that I was asked: “What happened before the headaches started? Think back three to six months.”

And there it was. About three months before the headaches began, I had a minor accident in PE class where I landed on my neck and passed out. When the paramedics transported me to the local hospital for an X-ray, the stretcher collapsed at the head end. Both impacts led to a bruised vertebra, and I had to wear a neck brace for three weeks.

If my GP had asked the right questions and not just assumed, I might not have lived with those headaches for two years.

But then, I might never have learned about Vitametik, and might never have had the opportunity to bring this method to the North West of England.

This experience taught me that healing often isn’t about pushing harder, but about understanding deeper.

Holistic work is not about being soft or gentle; it’s about seeing the whole picture and asking the right questions.

Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for our wellbeing is to look beyond the obvious, to connect the dots our bodies have been quietly showing us all along.

If you would like to learn more about Vitametik and if it can help you with your wellbeing, any chronic discomfort or stress, then please get in touch and we can connect on a discovery call.

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