Forward threading: a new way to learn
If you’ve been reading my blog series Empath sabotage, you may have noticed I posted a blog last week about how left-brained thinking can sometimes get the best of empaths. See, empaths tend to learn in more right-brained ways because the right brain is our emotional center and rules these highly sensitive personality types. It can be hard living in a world where people are rewarded for primarily functioning out of one side of their brain (the left), while the right-brained thinkers sometimes get their process or their experiences relegated as fringe, impractical, “overly emotional” or “artsy”. This needs to change. We need the empaths and right-brained thinkers to come out of the closet in order to have a more balanced flow of information and representation of the human experience.
I went to college for a degree in Education because of the struggles I faced over the years due to left-brained learning disabilities. It forces me to operate out of my right brain (being an empath is kind of a life sentence for me) and I have great difficulty performing mathematical and linear tasks. After being in classrooms over the years and working with kids (and now having a child myself), I see that we all learn in vastly different ways. Remember that you have a right to learn in whichever way works best for you, whether it be listening, observation, experience, memorization, etc.
But today I want to bring another learning method to you — one you may already use but are unaware of, or maybe one you have not considered before. If you’re an empath, you may do this naturally. It’s a technique I call “forward threading” and it’s a way to learn new information without needing to have a base of information to recall from. You see, the traditional educational model tells us you have to begin imparting a base set of knowledge from a very young age — math, letters, presidents, countries, shapes, sounds, etc. From there, children are taught progressively complex information that adds onto the base knowledge they have already acquired until they are considered proficient in knowledge memorization and recall.
Don’t get me wrong — this method works, for sure. But there are a few problems with only thinking in this one way. It creates rigidity because we only believe we are capable of learning if we already know something. Therefore, anything that is outside of our realm of understanding becomes something we feel uncomfortable thinking about. New theories, possibilities, brilliant ideas, flashes of insight are often dismissed, mocked, or ignored until there is “sufficient” evidence to support the foundation of the theory. These kinds of ideas get long forgotten when they could instead be put towards helping humanity and studying viable solutions to our biggest problems. Only information that fits very neatly into a preconceived notion of what knowledge is gets passed down.
Secondly, much of the information we use as our “base” is largely flawed, misinterpreted, contains gaps and holes, or is indecipherable. Everything is filtered through a human lens of the times so we may assume we understand the origins and workings of man based on what we have learned, but there is usually a much more interesting truth at the root.
Forward threading is a great technique because it’s a way to remember and learn new things that you can then write down, record, and be able to later explore, and debunk or confirm. It’s a way to tap into your subconscious mind without using meditation or other methods. Information will start coming to you as insights and you can simply jot them down to think about and come back to later. You don’t need to judge these ideas because doing that will stop the flow of information. The ego is a big road block to this kind of learning. Instead, reflect on what comes to you and later explore the ideas by researching or use the scientific method in your own life to see if it could be true.
For example, perhaps one day you begin reflecting and think, “This hummus is not agreeing with me. Every time I eat it, I get _______ symptom. I wonder if I could be sensitive to it.” So you sit with this idea for a few days. Then you begin deconstructing the ingredients in the hummus: chickpeas, water, tahini, lemon juice, garlic, salt — which could be the problem? Or is it the phytates, lectins, sodium or BPA, or could it be cross-reactive with gluten, etc? A few days later you have chickpeas on a salad and get the same reaction. The next day you take chickpeas out of your diet for three weeks with no other changes. One week in, you realize you no longer have that nagging symptom. After the three weeks, you are positive it was the chickpeas causing you problems because you haven’t felt ill the whole time you weren’t eating them. Take this information to a doctor and they may say, “Your diet has nothing to do with that. It’s unrelated. And anyway, no one has allergies to chickpeas.” You can then choose to take the standard approach and ignore your instincts in lieu of a rigid pyramid-based knowledge system that requires external validation, or you can trust yourself and keep that food out of your diet.
Over time, new insights will come to you more readily and rapidly. If you choose to trust yourself, you will experience more and more forward threading where you start to see what else in your diet or life may be a problem that you can then get answers to. Ask yourself a question, then wait for a solution to present itself. If you wait and seek it out, it will come. Then you have to begin trusting it.
I like to describe forward threading like this: imagine there is a long, infinite piece of string floating out in space. Though it has no anchors, it stays in place. You feel the urge to pull at the string by asking a question; something you want to know. When you ask, an answer suddenly pops into your mind — a solution, a good idea, an explanation you hadn’t thought of before and you realize this answer is a knot on the string. “I’m not sure if this is the truth” you may tell yourself. After all, you didn’t get this answer from a doctor, or pastor, book, or friend. You found it inside of yourself. Though, you don’t trust yourself so how could you trust the answer, you wonder. But the solution makes perfect sense so after a while, you decide to ask another question by pulling your fingers up the thread. You are given another solution and you realize there is another knot there. Eventually you realize you can keep asking questions in order to find solutions and with each tug you feel the individual threads of the string making it very real, as well as knots that signify answers. You can see that this thread keeps going forever and ever and isn’t limited to a base of knowledge. You are learning in forward.
Or, think about it this way: imagine you are in a terrible accident and wake up in the hospital a few days later with amnesia. You have no memory of who you are, why you are here, or what is happening. All you know is that you have a body that is now in pain and you have a consciousness that feels blank. Although you are an adult, you try to express your thoughts and they come out garbled much like an infant. A nurse stops by your room to check up on you. She speaks to you in plain English and it sparks your memory — you know the words she is speaking and you repeat them back to her. After a few interactions like this, you recall words and are able to say one or two to communicate your needs. After a few weeks, you begin stringing sentences together. No one re-taught you the basics of the alphabet or how sentences are composed; you simply acquired it through internal remembrance. As months pass, your strength builds and you rediscover things you enjoy doing, which gives you a faint remembrance of what you used to do/be in the world. It builds and builds.
I highly encourage you to give this technique a try. Ask yourself, “what do I need to know?”, “what do I need to learn?”, “what does this mean?”, “what is a solution to this?”. It will help you tap into your subconscious stressors that are keeping you sick and energetically drained. It will help you find solutions and get answers. It will help you trust yourself and ignore the loud noise of everyone around you when it comes to decision making in your life. Remember, don’t judge — just observe, then see if you can confirm it.
How to access your full potential as an empath
Are you one of the 15-20% of the population worldwide who is a true empath? Empaths are people who feel the pain of others very deeply, have a complex inner world, are interested in metaphysical or esoteric phenomena, feel overwhelmed by certain stimuli, have a certain loving naivete’ about them, instinctively understand the truth even if it has been withheld, and are here to help us transition into a new paradigm — one of love, peace, and equality.
Because this personality type is rare, empaths often go their entire lives feeling weird, different, and strange. They sometimes describe feeling like aliens on a planet they do not understand. They may try to fit in but ultimately are only partially able to do so because fitting in requires forgoing their true nature, which over time, causes physical and emotional disease. It’s an unfortunate trade off in which they can either be socially successful or personally successful.
The truth is, empaths weren’t born to fit in and go along, they are here to usher in an era of change and show the world what true love and compassion looks like. And we’re on the dawn of this age. They are here to use an entirely different section of the brain — the free-thinking, emotionally attentive right hemisphere — in a world full of left-brained systems, designs, structures, rules, and punishments.
In order to reach your highest potential as an empath, here’s what you need to know: you cannot become a fully self-actualized person while you are choosing the easy route. Your life has been hard on purpose — and I do mean hard. Empaths have exceptionally difficult life lessons because it is the experiences that develop your compassionate nature, help you build a fierceness that you were punished for or talked out of as a child, and become intuitive enough to recognize injustices when they are happening and actually do something about it.
For example, you likely have never received confirmation of your feelings and experiences (which empaths desperately need to prevent them from ongoing states of cognitive dissonance), you were spanked/gaslighted/emotionally neglected as a child because you were different and had a certain natural wisdom about you that threatened authority figures, and you have also been subject to extremely toxic relationships in which you were paired with at least one narcissistic personality in order to reveal your shadow side and understand how the narcissistic systems work.
But often because empaths are so sensitive to pain, they choose to avoid it, ignore it, and pretend it isn’t there. They play along like life is great or just retreat when things get rough. They feel addressing the pain would be too hard, and let’s face it — we also live in a world where talking about problems is still largely taboo and complicates your social life. Maybe you were even punished for doing so when you were younger. It’s simply easier to pretend you’re okay. Until you’re not — or can’t.
Ultimately your body and soul will reach a breaking point. There is only so much stuffing down you can do before your body is going to revolt and physical disease states will ensue. Ignoring the problems generates intense stress responses that will affect your stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, your thyroid hormones, your immune system (which becomes dysregulated in the presence of high cortisol), your gut (which also becomes dysfunctional in the presence of high cortisol and causes leaky gut syndrome and alters your gut microbiome), blood pressure, heart, kidneys, blood sugar, and more.
The time to do the soul work is now, empaths. The world is changing and as societal systems are restructured, we need to be ready to take the helm or at least take our equal seat at the table. If you’ve always wanted to help others and the world, now is your chance. But before you can do that, you have to delve into the hard work to overcome whatever is holding you back and keeping you stressed and sick.
Here’s how to access your full potential as an empath:
- Identify where the narcissistic personalities are in your life and chart out the problems in those relationships. The reality is, every empath who is not aware is going to have attracted many spiritual narcissists that are flat out draining you. If the other person is willing to work through the problems, great and that says a lot about their soul maturity. If they are not, they are holding back your soul’s growth and you need to make the brave decision to distance yourself. As you start peeling back the layers, so to speak, you may be amazed at just how many narcissistic personalities you are surrounded by. (Again, please don’t diagnose people — just use this information for yourself to understand what is going on around you and free yourself).
- Give in to your life lessons. The pain in your life is the signal that something needs to change or be worked through. As an Intuitive, in Energy Reading sessions, I easily recognize the patterns in one’s life and this tells us the overarching theme of your life lessons. Once you understand your life lessons, you can go forward with this knowledge and be able to recognize what to do in each future difficulty you encounter. It’s not just a random problem, it is a message and call to action.
- Stop living the attachment wound. An attachment wound is usually something you acquired in childhood by being told you weren’t good enough or worthy of love (in so many words, or based on the actions of your caregivers). Real love is unconditional and you do not have to be on the proverbial hamster wheel seeking love your whole life, worrying you will never get it because there is something wrong with you. Tell yourself everyday that you deserve love, there is nothing you can do to earn it, and people who lord love over you are not acting in love. Real love is unconditional with no strings attached and contains elements of true forgiveness despite any imperfections.
- Get out from under the “nice” spell and start being fierce. Chances are you feel conflicted about being loving and also standing up for yourself when necessary. You want to avoid confrontation at all costs so when you are put in situations where you have to tell the truth even if it is inconvenient and difficult, you internalize it as you are bad, wrong, hateful, imperfect, etc. Remember that love isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. Love is hard truth when necessary and standing up for yourself and others in the presence of evil and injustice. Just like a parent who reminds their child of the correct path to take — or problems to look out for — so too are empaths who are awakened: they tell the truth even when it is not convenient, because they know they lying and pretending is not real love and only perpetuates problems in the long run.
- Stop caring about what other people think. You have likely been trying to please people your entire life because empaths easily recognize the needs of others, want to meet them, and because you naturally have a servant energy archetype where the underlying assumption is that you will serve others interests while forsaking your own. People who only wanted you to serve their needs, or who expect you to be a diminutive version of yourself for their comfort are not your real allies. Trying to please them the rest of your life will get you nowhere but drained, overwhelmed, and sick. And it’s certainly not going to help the world if you’re not living out your true passions.
- Identify what you are good at, then pursue it hardcore. What you are good at is why you are here. The interests, skills, talents, and hobbies you have held back because they perhaps couldn’t support you 100% financially, because you didn’t think you had the time for, or thought others wouldn’t like it, are what the world desperately needs. Empaths aren’t just here to feel, they are here to do. That thing you have always wanted to contribute to the world — do it. Now. Even if you can’t get out of your day job, find ways to integrate your skills into your everyday life.
- Hack your “operating system”. Think of your body like a computer. You get a virus, you slow down, get sick, and use anti-virals. Something crashes and you have to reboot. A key or screen gets broken and you get it replaced. So too is your physical body: you have to upgrade your operating system in order to overcome physical illness. This includes knowing what your common gene mutations are and finding proper diet or supplements to support them, figuring out what your food sensitivities are and avoiding them, healing your gut health, reinoculating your G.I. tract with healthy bacteria and yeasts, identifying nutrient deficiencies, balancing hormones, doing chelation therapy with the help of a trained doctor, and more. This is much of what I do for clients in Nutrition Consultations.
- Fix your fascia. The mysofascial system is the literal, tangible mind-body connection that is visible to the naked eye. The fascia is the connective tissue that sits under your skin and on top of your muscles. If you have lived in states of chronic acidity, have deep-rooted infections (especially viral infections and Lyme co-infections), are mineral or protein deficient, you will have dysfunctional fascia called fascial adhesions. The way you move your body, your posture, spinal subluxations, and wearing tight clothing will also cause the development of adhesions. Typically the fascia should be a thin, flat structure that supports your movement and muscles. Due to the above reasons, thick adhesions form which cuts off blood flow, nutrients, oxygen, and range of mobility. In other words, it’s like you become mummified and calcified while you are still alive. It affects your hormones, causes pain, and keeps you chronically infected much to the detriment of your immune system. There are ways to reverse this and I highly recommend identifying your fascial adhesions in a Body Reading session, and then pursuing myofascial release in order to restore the fascia to its healthy state.
Remember, you are here to bring about change. Unfortunately, change is often scary and difficult. Empaths can access their full potential — 100% — but it will be challenging. The choice is yours if you prefer to remain quiet and just go along, or you choose to be brave and bold and confront the problems. If you choose to be brave, you will find healing and uncover the truth and power of who you actually are.
The healing you seek is right in front of you
Until you understand yourself, you will never understand your health. I have found this to be true time and time again both for myself and my clients over the last seven years. I will tell you the truth: your body is a metaphor for all you have lived, all you have experienced (the good and bad), and all of the trauma you have suppressed or internalized. The answers you seek are right in front of you.
That ache in your back, the tightness in your throat, the gait with which you walk, the way you carry your shoulders, the food allergies, the stomach bloat, the chronic fatigue, the brain fog — it is all a cue and clue as to the greater analogy of who you are, what you have been through, and how your body handled it all.
Think of your health as a poem. A left-brained critical thinker (aka: doctor) may take a look at the words (aka: your body) and assume prescriptions are the solution for any and everything that ails you. That is all they have been trained to do and they do not function outside of these boundaries because it feels scary to them. It is a trek into unknown, uncharted waters. To them, you are black and white, cut and cry, no gray area or room for discussion. Anything else would imply they don’t have all the answers.
Modern medicine has relegated health and wellness into the realm of the left-brained scientist: “Only they can be trusted, only they can be believed, only they have the answers I seek.” This just isn’t true. It takes a right-brained creative thinker that knows no bounds, is comfortable with free thought, and understands you are a limitless individual with limitless solutions available to you to find the answers to your pressing, painful health complaints. It takes a poet, an artist, an inventor to say, “there is more to the story. I know this because I can read between the lines.” Yes, we’ve been doing it all wrong.
What if instead of medicating (which never gets to the root of why you are experiencing the health problem in the first place) we began to “read” you to deconstruct the meaning behind it all? What if we unraveled, line by line, symptom by symptom, the meaning of you? What if we went so deep into you that we solved the mysteries?
Chronic illness does not have one cause. Yet thyroid diseases and autoimmune conditions are diagnosed and treated as though they do come from a singular cause. Medication, testing, adjusting of dosage, more testing, more adjusting. Round and round we go on this hamster wheel. You end up so frustrated or defeated that you give up trying to improve things altogether. Let me tell you this: it is not you, it is them.
I think of each client as a unique mystery begging to be solved. How did they get here? What is their potential for healing? What do we need to do to get them there quickly? I know there are always solutions because I healed my Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and put it into unmedicated remission despite medical professionals telling me it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t read between the lines, but I could. And I did.
I have worked with clients at the end of their rope with their health. I have seen women with Graves’ disease go medication-free and keep their labs in check with specific, tailored nutrition and deep mind-body work; Graves’ Disease! — an illness that can literally kill someone. They came to me eating a gluten-free and dairy-free diet because that’s what they’d read big-name left-brained doctors and internet stars say they had to do. It wasn’t getting them anywhere. You see, diseases happen for “cluster” reasons. Once we understand the cluster, we deconstruct it to stop it.
This means they didn’t just have a genetic predisposition to autoimmunity or hyperthyroidism — they had 10 or more issues that were compounding to create the Graves’ disease state:
- histamine intolerance
- large consumption of thyroid-stimulating foods (coconut, avocado, and brazil nuts, for example)
- leaky gut syndrome
- Epstein-Barr infections
- Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO)
- adrenal fatigue or high/low cortisol
- erratic blood sugar
- too little cholesterol in their diet and way too much plant-based saturated fat (thanks to big name doctors promoting a low-cholesterol, high saturated fat Paleo diet)
- nervous system dysregulation
- stored chaotic energy
- abuse or neglect
- little to no self-care
- “screaming” to be heard their entire lives
What happens when you deconstruct and remedy the cluster? You stop the disease state.
But keep in mind, this is only a template. It’s like the stanzas in a poem. The words will be unique to you, despite the outline of the rhythm being the same. Until you understand your unique cluster, you will never halt the health problems.
The answers you seek are literally and figuratively right in front of you. You must find someone to help you deconstruct the metaphor that is you.
