Learn True Health with Ashley James Ashley's Update For The Learn True Health Listener
Come join the supportive Facebook community: https://www.learntruehealth.com/group
Ashley’s Update For the Learn True Health Listeners
https://www.learntruehealth.com/ashleys-update-for-the-learn-true-health-listeners
In this episode, I give an update about what happened during the last two months since the previous episode. I share how I’m coping with the loss of a loved one. I also share my COVID experience and how I recovered from it.
Hello, true health seekers, it’s so good to be back. I know many of you probably are wondering what’s going on. I took some time off. The last time I was posting episodes you may have heard me talk about how I was pregnant and I had a beautiful pregnancy. I was very healthy the whole time, as was the baby. And if you’re not in our Facebook group, then you probably haven’t heard but I lost our child during delivery. She was born still earlier this month. We’re still waiting for some answers, but it looks like perhaps the cord was interrupted right at the very last few minutes of delivery.
She had a very strong and healthy heartbeat the whole time, and everything was smooth right up until the very end. And then just at the very end, sometime in the last three minutes, we lost her heartbeat right as she was coming out. Dealing with that, facing the grief, obviously recovering from labor, postpartum recovery, and then I got COVID. That was an adventure.
So this last month has for me been about emotional, spiritual, and physical recovery and healing. I kept thinking about you guys, and I kept thinking about what I would say, how I would share, and how much I wanted to share my journey with you. I’m really wanting to get on the microphone. If you’ve been a long-time listener, you know that all of my experiences I want to share because I want everyone to learn as I am learning. I’ve healed so many illnesses and diseases, I’ve come so far in my healing journey, and I continue to grow healthier and stronger. It’s not all just physical, right? It’s emotional, it’s mental healing and growth as well, it’s personal growth.
When the paramedics were working on her, the paramedics came very fast. It was a home birth, and the thing is, this would have happened in the hospital as well because there’s nothing we could have done. Everything was going perfectly and then all of a sudden she was gone. There wouldn’t have been time for any kind of medical intervention.
As I was lying on the bathroom floor and the paramedics were working on her and the first words out of my mouth were God, if it is in your plan, if it is your will please save her. That surprised me. I didn’t go to anger, I don’t feel any anger about it. I mean, obviously, I grieved and I grieved and I grieved because I lost. I lost the life I was going to have as a mother to this gorgeous baby girl. My husband and I grieved, and all our family and friends around us who are looking forward to being with her, they’ve all shared the impact with me that this has had.
But I didn’t go to anger. Something in me trusted that my life, my fate is in God’s hands. And I’ve never had that level of faith before, I’ve never felt it. It was unknowing, it was a deep, deep knowing, and it’s something that I don’t think I could teach anyone to do. It’s something you have to go within and you feel it and it’s unknowing. I just knew. I have no control over this situation. I have no control and this is 100% in God’s hands.
And so that experience surprised me. I didn’t know that I would grow spiritually so much from this. So I’ve really looked to God, and that spiritual component is I think really crucial in terms of mental and emotional healing. Being able to just pray and say, okay, I don’t have control over this aspect of my life, I don’t.
There are things I can control. I can control what I eat. I can control how much water I drink. I can control the vitamins I take. I can control what kind of media I take in, which affects our mental and emotional health. I can control, for the most part, the people that are around me or the people I choose to be around. So there are so many things I can control about my life, but these moments like a car accident, a death, an illness, a sudden infection. You can control how you react, but you can’t control the outcome.
Now, how you react can sometimes affect the outcome when someone’s already gone, when someone’s already dead. Now it’s time to focus on healing and growth and focus on what we can do. And then it’s okay. I really got that it’s okay that I can’t control everything. That there’s some peace, some grace in handing that part of my life over to God and just being this is out of my control, it’s in your hands.
I’ve had some very spiritual experiences this last month since she’s passed where I know she was here with me. Very interesting and I’ve heard from other friends who have lost loved ones. A song will come on at a specific time, a rainbow will all of a sudden appear, or a lamp or a device will all of a sudden just turn on when no one turned it on, that kind of thing. So I’ve had a few of those and I thought that was very interesting. There’s a song that I chose to play at her funeral and that song came on the radio. It was Yo-Yo Ma’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and that song came on the rainbow the next day as I was talking with my husband about her daughter. What are the chances, right? It was really beautiful.
So I wanted to come on the microphone and give you guys an update. I am every day getting better and better. It’s just one step at a time. I know everyone listening has lost someone or lost something in their life, has had to go through a process of grief. I’ve lost both my parents and so I’ve experienced it, but each one’s different. Each loss is different, but the feeling of going through grief, there are certain stages that are similar. What I can say is I’m really happy that I haven’t gotten stuck.
When I lost my mom, I got stuck in depression for months and months and months and I didn’t move out of that. I didn’t move out of the anger and the depression really that first shock. I was in denial most of the time, just bouncing back between denial, anger, and depression.
This time because we surrounded ourselves with loved ones and we’re talking it through and we’re working on it, and I also believe in my faith that God has a plan. And I have those spiritual beliefs about where we go when we die. That there’s a purpose, there’s a reason. I think that really helped me as well. But of course, that still doesn’t help because I want her to be here, I want her to be with me. She was so beautiful, she is so beautiful. Join the Facebook group, I posted a picture of her. She is so beautiful, and she was very gentle in the womb. She had a calm, gentle, loving energy the whole time. Really a sweetheart.
So I’m learning a lot about healing from loss. With every loss, we become stronger. We can, we have the potential to become stronger. So I’ve learned so much about myself those last few weeks, and I’ve thought about how I could then take that and incorporate that into the podcast so that I can help you. We all learn from each other. That’s something really beautiful also about our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group is that we are learning from each other and that we’re growing together.
I will continue to share the lessons that I’ve learned from this experience through the podcast as I find amazing guests to interview and have these great discussions with guests. If you’re new to the podcast, we focus on mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, and physical health. So there’s not a separation. When someone has a physical disease, they’re affected emotionally, they’re affected mentally. Sometimes, when people are in spiritual crisis, they experience mental and emotional health, as well as physical health issues. I mean, you can’t separate that.
You may have a diagnosis like diabetes, for example, and changing your diet and changing your lifestyle can reverse type 2 diabetes 100%. I did it myself. I reversed type 2 diabetes. My A1C is 4.7. I have amazing blood sugar, and I was diabetic for years. The point is though that those health changes weren’t just physical changes. I had to change my mindset, I had to do emotional work, I had to work on myself on a personal growth level.
So we enrich our lives by focusing on all areas, all aspects of health. That’s why the podcast is where I have doctors on the show, counselors, therapists, healers, and spiritual leaders on the show so that we can gain lessons from all these people. We can collect them all and apply what works for us.
So having COVID, that was really interesting. I used homeopathy, I worked with a homeopath, I worked with my naturopath. I got on all the natural stuff, and my body was just really, really worn down because of the grief and because I was postpartum. I was a few days postpartum. It hit me hard and I recovered fast. That’s what I’m so grateful for is that I was sick for less than 10 days. It was really bad. On day eight, I was very worried. It was hard to breathe, very worried for myself. But by day 10 I was totally on the road to recovery. Now I’m exercising. I’m a month postpartum and I’m back to exercising. I thank God. I thank God I don’t feel any of the effects. Some people experience long-term effects. I don’t have any of that.
I really contribute that to the fact that I eat clean and healthy. I take supplements. I’m not deficient in zinc. I take zinc every day. I did lose my sense of smell, and that was the weirdest because we have flowers throughout the house. So many people have given us beautiful flowers that are just smelling amazing as condolences for losing our daughter. All of a sudden I realized I couldn’t smell them. I grabbed my essential oils and I realized I couldn’t smell them either. I was like, oh no.
So I tripled up on my zinc. I started taking 90 milligrams of zinc a day and the zinc I take I really like this. Pure Encapsulations is the company, and it’s a zinc picolinate. It’s just 30 milligrams, and 40 milligrams is a very common safe dose for adults, so 30 is even less. But I decided to triple up on it. I took three, but not the same time—one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. And two days later, I got my sense of smell back 100%. My husband had a similar experience, and then I talked to a friend who was also going through COVID and they were having a similar experience, but they lost their sense of taste and smell. I told them that I had increased my zinc, they increased their zinc and it came back right away.
I thought that was very interesting. I’ve had a suspicion, and we’ve had a few interviews about that last year. My suspicion is that we use up the zinc when we have viral infections, especially like COVID. So then we become extremely deficient. By increasing it, then we’re just addressing the deficiency. That’s my suspicion.
I took all the supplements that I knew that have been shared through the podcast and that also we talk about in the Facebook group. Those all helped a lot. You know what really helped was glutathione. I ordered some liquid glutathione through a friend of mine who’s a holistic practitioner and that really helped as well. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’m back on my feet, and every day I am healing and growing stronger.
So jumping back into doing the podcast, I’m also in the process possibly of moving. We might have another disruption in podcast episodes, but I’m back. I want to start publishing weekly. I have some episodes I recorded before I gave birth. I’m going to be publishing those soon. If episodes, I might mention something about being pregnant so just a heads up. Those episodes were recorded about two months ago. They’re still very relevant, the information. So if that happens, just know that I am no longer pregnant currently. However, those were past recorded episodes, which I’ve been meaning to get up. I just got to the point in the pregnancy where I’m like, okay, my brain’s not working. I think it was at 38 weeks. I’m like, I need to take some time off.
Thank you guys for being on this journey with me. There are over 4000 people in the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you guys have been so supportive as I shared my experiences of having lost our daughter. Your support and your comments were so helpful. I read every single one of them. Often I read them to my husband, and often I cried.
There are so many listeners like me who have lost a child, either to miscarriage, to stillbirth, early infant death, or even later. You’re not alone. That’s something that’s really important to know. Surround yourself with loving people who make you feel like you’re not alone and make you feel heard and listened to, and continue to share. No matter how sad you are, how lonely you feel, or how upset you are around losing someone you love, especially a child, your impact on the world matters and you being here matters.
Vale, our daughter, was only here for a short time living inside me, and she had such an impact on my life. And then I heard that she had an impact on others. A few friends came to me and said that this whole experience has given them so much gratitude for their children and for their health. They were worried that that would sound selfish, and it’s not. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s their experience. Of course, if you’re hearing that I lost a child, you’re going to want to go and hug your child, or hug your spouse, hug the person you love most. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, right?
Sometimes we get so caught up in the minutiae of life, in the stressors of life, and that rat race of paying bills, coming home, and just popping yourself in front of the boob tube. We go unconscious, so many times in our life going conscious about what we’re eating or how we’re not taking care of our bodies, and then all of a sudden we’re 30 pounds heavier. We’re like, what just happened? Especially this last year with COVID, people changed their routines, they went unconscious, they started self-soothing with food, alcohol, drugs, and TV. It’s easy to lose sight of the people you love the most and the amount of gratitude you have for them.
So sometimes we need that wake-up call, that reminder, what is most important to us? Put down the remote control. I’m guilty too. I’m talking from personal experience. But put down the sugary, alcoholic beverages, or whatever we are using to sell soothe, and go be present with the person or the people that you love most. Have that experience where you’re in touch with the gratitude for those people.
I am hugging my son harder than ever before now. I’m so grateful for my husband and my son. That’s another thing I noticed that when I realized I’d lost her is I started to think about all the things I was grateful for. Obviously, I’m in deep sorrow. I was in absolute shock, and this was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it absolutely immediately shined a light on what I do have. What am I grateful for, and that also really helped me is constantly thinking I’m alive. I could have died, right? There are women who in these situations, they die during birth along with the baby. I mean, I’m alive. I’m so thankful for that. I have an amazing son. I have an amazing husband. There are so many people I’m grateful for in my life, so many friends I’m grateful for. There are so many things I have to be grateful for, and I am. I’m grateful for the time I got to have with our daughter. So I keep focusing on that as well.
Gratitude is a healing tool. I’m not ignoring the sadness. I’m not ignoring the grief or any of those other emotions that come with it. I’m holding that, I’m honoring her in my heart, and I’m also getting in touch with the gratitude because that allows me to not be unconscious in my life. Stay on the path of taking care of myself, which is really important. I noticed both losing my mom especially and losing my dad, I stopped taking care of myself. I just went to self-soothe with food. Luckily, I was never one of those people that liked self-soothing with alcohol or drugs. It was more just sugar, which I’m not into anymore, thank God.
I would self-soothe with TV and food, go unconscious, and not take care of myself, not even brush my hair. That’s why I really knew I was in a hole, I was in depression when I lost my mom when I just didn’t take care of myself. With this, I watched and I made sure I’m still taking care of myself. I’m focusing on gratitude.
Keep listening to the podcast, join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group if you haven’t already. Some amazing episodes, these interviews I did, like I said, before I gave birth. There are a few episodes I’ve got to post that are really good, and I’ve been looking forward to sitting down and editing them, getting them posted. And then I’ve got some great interviews lined up this whole month. I’ve got some really cool guests, so I’m looking forward to having you listen to all that.
Come join the Facebook group so that you can be part of the community and part of the conversations that we have about guests and about things that we learn together and just come be part of that. It’d be great to have you. It’s a very supportive community, and I just love being a part of that growing community of holistic like-minded people.
Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. Life is a blessing, and it’s hard. Without the loss, how can we truly feel the gain, right? I am hopeful for the future. Of course, there are moments where I just completely break down, but I’m just present in the moment with all the emotions.
I also have been doing some Emotion Code work. Oh my gosh, that stuff works. Go back and listen to that episode, it was a few episodes ago. A friend of mine who’s a mental health counselor, she’s been studying it, so she’s done some with me and it really works. I’m feeling it, which is really cool. I mean, I knew it would, but to experience it firsthand it’s very neat. It’s a very gentle process, and then all of a sudden you’re like wow, I feel different. I feel good, I feel better, I feel whole. I’m just noticing I don’t feel fractionated. It’s very interesting. So, yeah, check that episode out if you haven’t already, especially if you know you’ve got some emotional work that you want to release from your body.
All right. Well, I’m about to go in a few minutes and do an interview. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Learn True Health podcast.
Get Connected with Ashley James!