Welcome To The Body Is A Trailhead!

If you’ve just crossed over to Substack with me from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or my private email list, welcome to The Body Is A Trailhead!

They don’t teach us to think this way in medical school, but in the trauma healing model of Internal Family Systems (IFS), we think of physical cues and medical symptoms as trailheads we can choose to walk down with curiosity and self-inquiry, as a spiritual path for healing from trauma and deepening our connection with the body, our hurt “parts,” and a world that isn’t always kind to our hearts or our bodies. After 9 years of following these body trailheads personally and professionally, I feel inspired to share what I continue learning for those of you who are also on a sacred path of healing.

Since publishing my New York Times bestseller Mind Over Medicine in 2013, the intersection of science, psychology, and spirituality has fundamentally changed- so much so that I completely rewrote a revised edition in 2020 to update what the culture has learned. The zeitgeist is catching up to the idea that the body is a repository for trauma, and its symptoms may betray the secrets we try to keep or the memories we bury deep. But what if the body is not just a toilet that buries our toxins in our tissues? What if the body is less about keeping the score or carrying the weight of our stories and more like a doorway into an inner world that might contain pain and ecstasy, hypersensitivity and empathy, memory and mystery, contamination and compassion, surprises and stories of unconditional love, synchronicity and solutions? 

What if the body is also not just an individual receptacle we alone are responsible for healing? What if the body is a doorway into cultural and systemic wounds that impact not just the individual, but the web of all bodies who are impacted by systemic oppression, climate crisis, white body supremacy, poverty, gender inequality and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, a misunderstanding of neurodiversity, war violence, the injustices of late stage capitalism, environmental destruction, and other wounds to the body politic? 

What if the body is at once a separate being and also interconnected to other bodies, not just human bodies, but animal bodies, plant bodies, and the body of Mother Earth? What if taking control of your health and accepting personal responsibility for your healing can greatly impact your health outcome, but that impact is limited by factors that may be out of your control and must be addressed systemically and politically, not personally? What if much of the messaging in the health and wellness industry is based on the erroneous idea that you- and you alone- can optimize your health? What if, instead, we all use the body as a doorway into deeper empathy, greater insight, and the holy awareness that all bodies- especially oppressed and marginalized bodies- need all of us to protect the sacredness of every body on this planet?

As a physician, yes, I’m all about doing what’s in your power to optimize your health outcome and make your body ripe for miracles, whether you’re dealing with a chronic or terminal illness, or whether you’re healthy and doing so for preventive medicine. But we can only take so much responsibility for the place our bodies reside in the web of life that privileges and values some bodies more than others and inflicts generational wounds unequally, depending on issues like gender and gender identity, where you lie in a pigmentocracy where white skin privileges people more than brown skin, what country you were born into, who you choose to love, and how socioeconomically privileged you are.

As the late Paul Farmer, MD said, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

That needs to change. STAT.

These are just a few of the topics I’ll continue to write about, as I’ve been doing for 14 years now.

In The Body Is A Trailhead, I will be writing about the cutting edge of my understanding of:

• “Spontaneous” or radical remission

• Putting the “care” back in health care

• Supporting health care providers and patients in navigating a broken health care system

• Trauma-informed, mind-body-spirit medicine

• Trauma-informed spirituality

• Internal Family Systems (IFS) as an antidote to spiritual bypassing and the “how” of Self-compassion

• Tips for recovery from narcissistic abuse and coercive control as it impacts mental and physical health

• IFS-informed boundary-setting

• Keeping the sacred alive without the oppressive indoctrination of religion or New Age spirituality

• Finding the baby in the bathwater of spirituality and the wellness industry

• Freeing ourselves and each other from oppression so we can live in a world without power hierarchies that unjustly oppress some people and unfairly privilege others

Just like I’ve been writing for free- as a public service- on my blog and on social media for 14 years now, I’ll still be regularly sharing, as my gift, what’s on my mind and in my heart. Like usual, you’ll be able to read most of what I write for free, at no charge. I’ll be writing new free content regularly, as I’ve done since 2009.

I’ll also be offering exclusive content only for my paid subscribers. My book Sacred Medicine was originally 250,000 words, and my publisher wanted me to cut it down to 100,000.  So I have 150,000 words of juicy, spicy, unpublished content I wrote for that book, and I’ll be sharing that here, exclusively, with my paid subscribers.

I’ve also written two full length books during the pandemic that I’ve decided not to publish the traditional way. One is about IFS-informed boundaries, called The Boundaries Handbook: How To Keep Your Heart Open While Staying Safe In Relationships, which was inspired by my partner, who asked me if I had learned anything about boundaries during my years of being in really good therapy. 

The other book is called Love Bigger: An Exploration Of Spirituality Without Spiritual Bypassing, which includes a lot of what I learned about trauma-informed spirituality and social justice during the chaos of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the MeToo movement.

I’ll be drip feeding content from those three books here for paid subscribers. For those who like to listen to my voice, I'll be offering paid subscribers audio content, including guided practices, meditations, and readings of some of this community's favorite written posts for those who prefer to listen rather than read.

For paid subscribers, I’ll also be writing about the very delicate path of recovery my romantic partner and I are walking together, as he recovers from a lifetime of narcissistic abuse and coercive control. I’m working hard on my own recovery to leverage my relative nervous system privilege to try to co-regulate us both into a deeper intimacy that’s safe enough to heal, in a way that allows us to equally share power as best we can. My partner and I are learning how to deepen intimacy and safety when trust and safety have been shattered in the past by other untrustworthy people. Our private relationship is teaching us both how to love with extreme empathy and compassion- for our own parts and for each other's, without martyrdom.

We are walking our way to health, hand in hand, with really good therapists (like Indoctrination podcaster Rachel Bernstein and 3 IFS therapists) walking beside us. We know it’s a massive privilege to be able to afford such great therapy, so we’re both on board to share what we’re learning with those of you who might not be able to afford $300 therapy sessions but might be able to afford $5/month on Substack. That way, we can have a little more privacy as we share what we’re learning, since paid subscriber content isn’t Google searchable or available to anyone who doesn’t subscribe.

Because it's so important to protect the sacred space for commenting, commenting on free content is reserved for paid subscribers. After a decade of dealing with haters, bots, and con artists on social media, part of my decision to move to Substack is to protect my own vulnerability and sensitivities from abuse on social media. I figure those hell bent on harassing me are unlikely to pay $5/month to attack me or others in our community. So please consider any paid subscription part of protecting the safety of our community and of me, so we can talk about hard things in a reasonably safe way.

Most of what I have offered to the world I offer at no charge, and I'm pivoting some of my attention to my non-profit Heal At Last, to try to bring trauma healing and spiritual healing to communities of chronically ill patients who can't afford the cutting edge healing treatments. So please, if you can afford to subscribe, you'll be supporting me and my team at Heal At Last in our philanthropic mission to tend to marginalized and oppressed communities who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. If you can't afford even $5/month, please know we're doing everything we know how to do to help support you too, and you're welcome here as well.

I’m also working on a new book about Internal Family Systems for medical conditions. I’m hoping you all will help me crowd source this book, so I can make sure it’s as absolutely sensitive and empathic to sick patients and trauma survivors as it can possibly be. Any subscription you commit to here will help free me up from other for profit work so I can offer my philanthropic contribution to the cause of health equity at Heal At Last and bring what we’re learning to less privileged populations.

So welcome. I hope you accept this sacred invitation- to walk through the doorway with us into this exploration together. I am excited to continue our journey together in this new way.

With gratitude for your loyalty and care about what I write,
Lissa

Lissa Rankin, MD is the author of 7 books, an OB/GYN physician, a TEDx speaker, a passionate expert in trauma-informed medicine and spirituality, the founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute and Heal At Last, a radical remission researcher, a social justice warrior, a relentless mystic, and the mother of a teenage girl and a goofy doggo. She lives bi-coastally, part time in a foggy coastal village in the Bay Area with her daughter and housemate April and part time in Boston with her Harvard MD partner Jeffrey Rediger, author of Cured.