Self Love – Traditionally Empowered Healing LLC

Blog, healing, Nervous systen, Parasympathetic, Reset, Self Love

The Unspoken Side Effects of Relaxing Your Nervous System

September 4, 2026 Anat Shlagman Traditional Naturopath

Relaxing your nervous system is one of the most beneficial ways to help your body heal. By doing so, your body shifts from being stuck in a passive survival mode to being proactive in detecting and correcting what’s needed. This process requires a grand investment of your time and efforts but is very effective.

Yet, while this investment shows great healing benefits, you might find yourself occasionally shifting back into your old habits, without understanding why you cannot commit to your healing journey. And then, you will most likely decide that it is more convenient to keep your familiar ways, rather than attempting to make a change.

Why would this be happening? Could there be some unspoken side effects to the process of relaxing your nervous system? Could these side effects cause a great disservice to your healing journey when they are not addressed properly, preventing you from healing? Is there anything you can do about it?

Let’s take a look at some examples of the spoken effects and their unspoken side ones and see if there is anything you can do to address them:

Spoken Effect: Healing from long-standing conditions
As we mentioned above, when your nervous system relaxes, your body has the means to detect and correct what’s needed. Then, healing will become part of your life, and any long-standing condition will begin to slowly disappear.

Unspoken Side Effect: Benefits of possessing a condition
Healing should be the most desired action for everyone who suffers from any condition. However, you may be among those who secured themselves with some benefits of possessing a condition – attention from your family and friends, having your condition as a topic of conversation to talk about, accepting priorities in lines in airports or supermarkets, or reimbursements/payments benefits, etc…
When you are not fully aware that there is a need to shift your mindset to one of a healthy person along with the need to become independent regardless to your conditions, you may be very disappointed once the benefits you enjoyed disappear. This might pull you back into your old habits, finding no interest in healing.

What can you do?
Take a moment to look within and ask yourself how your condition benefits you. Take another moment to look within and ask yourself how would healing benefit you. Then, ask yourself if you are willing to renounce your condition in order to gain your health. Honesty is a must in this process. Especially being honest to yourself.

Spoken Effect: New perception of the truth
Once your nervous system relaxes, you begin to see the world with “new glasses”. You may find that the truth is not necessary what you were telling yourself all these years. The truth might include painful realizations about your life, your family, or your friends, which will eventually help you understand that changes in your life are necessary.

Unspoken Side Effect: Fear of facing the truth
Making changes is inconvenient when you live in some type of perceived balance, which feels comfortable and familiar. Therefore, when you open up and discover facts that you are not ready yet to process, you may feel overwhelmed and inclined to go back to your old habits, where you feel safer.

What can you do?
As mentioned before, honesty is the key. When you allow yourself to be sincere, you will be open to accept the fact that the choices you made in your life brought your body to a place of dis-ease. From here, instead of scolding yourself in disbelief, you might consider choosing to forgive and love yourself unconditionally. Doing so will provide you a space to contain and process all your new realizations.

Spoken Effect: Weight Loss
When Nervous system is in survival mode, your body will be holding on everything, as there is no certainty in regard to what it needs. Therefore, there is no way you can lose any weight.
Once your nervous system relaxes, your body will get the message that “war is over” and will start to release what is not serving any longer. Then, your digestive system will function more efficiently, and your weight will probably go down.

Unspoken Side Effect: Body flooded with memories
As you go through life, your cells retain memories of every event that happened and has not been processed. When these events accumulate, your body will need to cover them so you will not be overwhelmed. Covering is done by pilling up mass, aka, gaining weight. Once you begin to lose weight, all these stored memories will set loose and pop up in your mind without any advanced notice. If you are not aware of this pattern, you may be caught in past traumas and fall into emotional eating, gaining back all your lost weight.

What can you do?
Let’s establish one basic forgotten fact – your body is your buddy, your roommate, as you both reside together in the same building. That’s why your body will never turn against you! Your body simply uses everything you provide to keep you alive. Many times, it will need to compromise as you may not provide all it needs. So, when memories arise, it is because your body cannot hold them any longer, not because your body is on a quest to prove you wrong. Take the time to look into each memory and mentally state: “I accept you into my life as you are part of me”. Then move on. The memory will not bother you anymore, as all it needed was to be acknowledged.

Spoken Effect: Increased awareness of your body
When relaxing your nervous system comes from routine activities like nourishment, castor oil packs and touch, you will discover that your awareness of your body increases, meaning that you will be able to notice subtle changes in your body and tend them before they become a problem.

Unspoken Side Effect: New sensations of pain
With that said, pains and discomforts might appear in areas that you did not notice them before. These are not new sensations, as these pains were there before, but this is a new awareness – now you know they are there! However, you may think that these sensations were caused because of the new changes you made and then choose to go back to your old habits.

What can you do?
First and foremost – breathe!!!! Before jumping to any conclusions – take a deep breath in and a slow breath out. Now, pay attention to the area that hurts – did something happen there in the past? It can be a physical or emotional or mental issue. Take the time to ponder with tenderness and no judgement. Keep your new routine and see if there is any correlation between your pain and what you ate, what you thought or the environment you were in.

Embarking on a healing journey that involves relaxation of your nervous system, will always bring wider effects than anything you would expect. This should not loosen your commitment. On the contrary – once you embrace all that comes your way, you will find that your healing is much deeper and meaningful. Your connection with your own body will strengthen, up to the point that you will want to maintain your new healthy lifestyle. In order to do so, I would like to share few general points that helped me on my ongoing journey hoping they can assist you as well:

🪄Surround yourself with people who walked this path, as they will understand what you are going through and will encourage you by their life example to continue. Remember that you do not need to be like them – you just need to absorb the inspiration from their actions.

🪄Appreciate your uniqueness and do not fear to create your individual path. Educate yourself and learn from other’s experiences. Remember not to limit yourself to their examples – turn this knowledge into something that serves your own needs. Be creative! Shine in your own way!

🪄Learn from your mistakes, as they are an awesome tool to understand what is working for you. Remember to leave your self-scolding aside and concentrate on the new revelations coming to light from your actions.

🪄When things get rough – take a moment to check in. Be honest with yourself while you scan the arising issues which stand in your way to healing. Remember to take a moment to breathe, and if needed – repeat!

If you feel in a bind – seek help before you decide on quitting. There are many professionals out there that can teach you how to deal with these issues – psychologists, hypnotists and even myself. Do not let your past dictate your future. Relax your nervous system and allow all the effects and side effects to come to surface and face each one of them with the confidence that they are here to move you forward on your healing journey.

Blog, Castor oil, Commitment to self, Healing Environment, Nervous systen, Nourishment, Parasympathetic, Reset, Self Heal, Self Love

What If Healing Is Your Birthright?

May 6, 2026May 6, 2026 Anat Shlagman Traditional Naturopath

What if healing is your birthright—not a privilege reserved for the chosen few, but an inherent capacity which is an integral part of your own being? What if from the moment you are born, your body, mind, and spirit are designed to repair, adapt, and return to balance? What if your genes already hold everything needed for healing—so it isn’t something given from the outside, but something that already exists within you, simply waiting to be supported and allowed?

Would you be willing to support your body and allow your healing to unfold?

Maybe you would and maybe you won’t.

Probably the thought of it might create a dilemma in your head, as many people grow up believing that healing comes only from outside sources—experts, medications, or circumstances aligning perfectly. These sources can play a meaningful role in the healing process, but because they’re so deeply embedded in our culture, it can be difficult to see that they just facilitate the healing—while the true source of it resides within you.

As I mentioned before in my article The Art of Healing Yourself, you are the only one who can provide the environment for your body, mind and spirit to heal. All the knowledge already exists in your genes, but it doesn’t always have the right environment to be activated. Once you provide this environment, you will be transforming from dependency on outer sources to partnership with your own body.

Working in partnership with your own body is not always comfortable or quick, and it will require you to slow down and face patterns, beliefs, or emotions that you have long avoided. Healing will begin when you open yourself to accepting uncomfortable feelings without judgment. And then you will also start to shift…

A shift is a gift, which some may be hesitant to accept, due to the common belief that healing means returning to who you were before the pain or illness, stating sentences as “I wish to be back to my own self”.

But true healing is an act of transformation!! True healing comes when you utilize your energy to integrate and accept your past experiences instead of burning it out on dismissing them. Conserving this valuable energy will supply you with vitality to making small, consistent choices which will set you on your healing path. Some of the choices may include:

How you nourish your body

How you speak to yourself

How you manage stress

Who you allow into your environment

Accepting healing as your birthright while mindfully making small sustainable changes will enable you to own your shifting, even when your family or friends are slow to accommodate your “new you”.

With that said, the process of healing may take longer than you hoped. This doesn’t mean that you are wrong or that you need to go back into your old habits. It only means that time has come to exercise your trust:

Trust that your body is not working against you, even when it feels like it is.

Trust that your mind can learn new patterns, regardless of your chronical age.

Trust that no matter how far you feel from wholeness, this path is available for everyone who seeks it.

Learning to trust, when no one around can demonstrate it, is one of the most fundamental steps towards healing. When you trust, you stop zigzagging with your actions and start focusing on healing, because zigzagging brings confusion into your body preventing the healing process to begin.

How can you sustain trust and stay on track with your decisions? Only by bringing your nervous system to a deep relaxed state and assuring your body that “war is over!”.

Your nervous system is the lenses through which you perceive the world, thus, the busier you are surviving, the less able you are to trust unpopular ideas, especially when these ideas are not entertained by your closest friends and family. Would a daily application of a castor oil pack on your abdomen help? No doubt!! Would a daily consumption of chicken soup/bone broth/root vegetable soup make a change? Of course!! These are not magic pills, but long-lasting restorative tools on your healing journey.

Embracing healing as your birthright may require jumping through meaningful challenging hurdles. This may require a significant time and energy investment. Yet, this investment will open up the opportunity to clear your lenses and discover that healing is not something you have to earn or explain or apologies for. Healing is simply something that you allow.

And this all you need to do!!

Allow…

Then your birthright of healing will manifest to its fullest!!!!

Elementary my friend!

But if it doesn’t feel elementary to you and you need my help – don’t hesitate to reach out. We can work together to fine-tune the best way for you to allow your birthright to shine.

Blog, Commitment to self, healing, Healing Environment, Nervous systen, Reset, Self Heal, Self Love

What If You Were a Healer?

December 17, 2025 Anat Shlagman Traditional Naturopath

Thinking about the word “healer”, we might find ourselves living in a misconception, backed up by the Oxford dictionary definition, that a healer is “a person who seeks to cure diseases or heal injuries by means other than conventional medical treatment”. This definition implies that the body is an object that requires a healer to engaged in the mission of actively healing it. Is that so? Does your body have no abilities other than waiting for someone to heal it?

What if your body already knows how to heal itself but lacks the proper environment to do it? What if a healer was the one who creates the environment for your body to heal, while trusting your body’s wisdom to do the work, without actively engaging in healing it? What if you could create that environment for your body? What if you were a healer?

When you accept yourself as a healer, you have one mission only – to nurture the environment for your body to heal itself. You do not need to actively heal your body. All you need to do is to create the environment so your body can reach the wisdom which is embedded in its genes to heal itself.

What would that environment be? Each body is different, thus each one of us will have individual needs. In order to understand your unique needs, best would be to open a line of communication between you and your body.

Pain or discomfort are the most common communications you would receive from your body, signaling you to pay attention to your actions, since something you do is not making your body comfortable. When you tend to the pain by checking what went wrong, your body will know that you are available to listen.

What could go wrong that might bring pain to your body?
Everything you can possibly imagine, in every aspect that you can possibly perceive – physically, emotionally or mentally.

Here are some examples to explore, feel free to venture into any other idea that will pop into your mind:

Starting with the Physical possibilities – can your body thrive with what you supply, or just survive?
1. Nourishment & hydration – what’s on your plate and in your cup?
2. Resting – How deep is your sleep?
3. Movement & touch – Are you tending your body with physical activity and physical touch?

Continue with the Emotional possibilities- can your body thrive with the way you feel, or just survive?
1. Love – Are you in a loving and caring environment – at home, at work, in life?
2. Anxiety/fear/stress – Are your demons controlling you?
3. Social – Do you feel surrounded by like-minded friends or feel lonely with no one to engage in a deep meaningful conversation?

Following with the Mental possibilities – can your body thrive with your perceptions or just survive?
1. Values – Can you protect your values or need to compromise them when conflicted?
2. Space – Are you giving yourself priority space on your to-do list?
3. Believes – Are the believes you hold created by society’s expectations or authentically generated according to your values?

Taking the time to ask yourself if your body thrives or survives is the first step as a healer to understand which environment your body needs in order to heal. Answering honestly without judgment will allow your body to open up and reveal it needs.

But what if you, probably like 99% of the people in the world, find that you have too many issues to address in order to be able to create your healing environment? This might be a bit discouraging, prompting you to face two opposing options:

Making the decision to ignore it all and continue your life as before without any changes.
Making the decision to start a slow process of change. This can be done by writing down a list of your issues, then choosing one issue from your list to address.

The freedom to make choices carries the heavy toll of owning the consequences of your actions: whatever you choose – you are the one who has to live with it. Yet, when your decision is made after you take the time to listen to your body, you might find it more motivating to choose to start a slow process of change, rather than ignoring it all.

Once you made the decision to start a slow process of change, you become a healer. Always remember that your exclusive role as a healer is to create the right environment for your own body to heal itself. You do not need to heal your body, nor your family/neighbors/friends’ bodies! Only focusing on the environment that your own body needs.

Will that be fast? Probably not. Will that be easy? Definitely not. This is a journey. Each one of us is a healer! Each one of us can create the environment for our own body to heal. And by doing so, each one of us can set the example for our families, neighbors and friends to follow our lead, tending to their own personal environments for their bodies to heal.

If you are not sure how to begin your journey, I invite you to come in for a session to reconnect with your own body, understand the environment that your body needs and realign your healing plans.

This holiday season, I am holding the prayers for each one of us to open ourselves to listen to our own body and spread light into the world from our own healing environments.

Wishing you all heart-filling holidays and a healing new year ahead!

Blog, Castor oil, Commitment to self, healing, Nervous systen, Nourishment, Parasympathetic, Reset, Self Heal, Self Love, Workshops

Can We Let All Storms Pass Alongside Us and Not Through Us?

October 3, 2025October 3, 2025 Anat Shlagman Traditional Naturopath

These days, it looks as if our world is filled with storms: Political storms, medical storms, human rights storms, and any other agenda the mind can invent and turn into a storm…

Mysteriously enough, these storms seem to have the tendency to become a whirlpool that uproots and swirls us until we are slowly striped from our own personalities. It feels that in our panic of the storm, we act as if the only way to survive it is to let the storm peel away everything we have, and many times, after it passes, we might regret and re-think our actions.

Could there be a different way to survive a storm? A way in which we trust that our own personalities are worth standing rooted while letting the storm pass alongside us instead of swirling everything within while it passes through us?

Of course there is a way! But this way is not granted! An effort needs to be made to keep us strong facing a storm. I will explain how this can be done, but beforehand, let’s understand why we want to do so.

Remembering the legacy of Hersh Polin Goldberg, RIP, an American-Israeli 23 yrs old, who was kidnapped on October 7th, 2023, and was murdered along with 5 other young Israeli hostages while held captive for 11 months in the tunnels of Gaza. In his page-turner must-read book, “Hostage”, Eli Sharabi tells his own story and reflects how Hersh inspired every hostage he met with his famous sentence: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” Eli Sharabi, who was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri, held onto his own ‘why’ – returning to his British-Israeli wife and 2 teenage daughters – for 491 days, then was released from captivity only to discover that they were murdered on Oct 7th, 2023. May they all Rest in Peace.

Back to our storms, looking for our own, much less intense ‘whys’ to let storms pass alongside us without allowing them to pass through us. I will note here my thoughts, examining what is building our character and personality. Feel free to add as many of your thoughts as you need.

WHY?

Our character is made of critical thinking skills, which help us decern what benefits us and what does not. We operate these skills by asking questions. Keeping in mind that every question is relevant, when we are swept off into a stormy swirl, we might feel that our questions are dismissed without a satisfactory answer. Then, we might feel lost or even irrelevant.
Our uniqueness is part of our personality. Every decision we make, about our health, our money, our life, should be made in accordance with our unique needs, regardless to the popular (maybe even engineered) opinions about it. When we are swept off into a stormy swirl, while our unique necessities are mostly lessened, we might experience an unhealthy internal conflict between our physical, emotional and mental states, which can lead us to depression and/or physical illness.
Our own values are the foundational building blocks of our character and personalities. When we are swept off into a stormy swirl, we might feel that our values are compromised, maybe even to the level we feel as our whole self is being diminished. And this as well could lead to a physical or mental illness.

All of these sounds very gloomy, and many times we choose to disregard and continue our lives as if none of them exist. If you choose to do so and you are happy and healthy, then all is great. However, if you are not truly happy and not truly healthy, I would like to invite you to read further unfolding my opinion on how to make a brave decision to stop being swept into a stormy swirl.

How?

First and foremost, we need to tend our nervous system, and it is our window to the world. We act and react to everything that is happening around us through the state of our nervous system. The more our nervous system is on a survival mode, the more automatic and repetitive will be our response. When we succeed to relax our nervous system and take it out of its survival state, we can make time to create new plans of actions, which are more beneficial and upon repeating they can become automatic as well.

As I explain in my article, The Art of Healing Yourself, we have to create the environment for our body to meet its survival needs, in order to relax our nervous system: “What are these survival needs? Think about babies – what do they need? To sleep, to eat, to be touched, to be soothed, to be clean, to move and to learn how to coexist with others in the world. We may have grown out of our baby stage, but our needs have not changed. However, now, we are engaged with so many responsibilities which have become a priority over our basic needs.
Here begins our part as self-healers, by tending to our basic needs and helping our body meet them. How can we do that? Simply by going back to basics – returning to all the actions that we usually skip through our busy life. These actions are also known as the pillars of Traditional Naturopathy: Nourishment, Bodywork, Rest/sleep, Energy work, Herbal medicine, Hydrotherapy, Education, and Movement.”

Could a castor oil pack make a difference here? I have no doubt about it!!!!!

Is it worth all the trouble just to be able to allow the storm pass alongside you? I cannot make this decision for you. I can only advise to look back at your “why” list and decide from there. My journey, learning with great effort how to stand tall alongside storms, helped me understand, that even though my values and beliefs are different than anyone else’s, they are never less valid. And this is what I preach and teach ever since.

If you need my assistance to learn how to shine your wonderful personality and never allow any storm to diminish it, contact me. I am happy help!

And if you are around on November 9th, 2025, you are invited to a special hands-on event, led by Ariana Buksdorf and me, at the Hampton Inn Commerce Novi. All details in the following link: The Art of Caring for Self.

Always remember that a change is never easy, and it will happen only when you feel that you are ready for it. As we open the new Jewish year, may it be filled with blessed changes to lift us up to our best possible lives, and may we always find the strength to allow every storm to pass alongside us without swiping us up into its swirl!!!!!

Blog, Castor oil, Commitment to self, healing, Nervous systen, Parasympathetic, Self Heal, Self Love

Is Your Liver the Best Place to Apply a Castor Oil Pack?

July 23, 2025July 23, 2025 Anat Shlagman Traditional Naturopath

Many of you ask me where exactly the castor oil pack should be applied. The confusion comes from online suggestions to apply it on your liver (meaning on your right side, just below your ribcage).

Convincing as these suggestions may be, you are not always sure if you should listen to the net or choose a different area of your body for the castor application to maximize the benefits…

Before sharing my opinion, I would like to take a moment to review what all the fuss about castor oil is. Castor oil, a very thick oil derived from the castor (Ricinus communis) seed, has been praised for decades for its numerous benefits. Among them:

Easing various conditions as uterine fibroids, ovarian cysts, endometriosis, headaches, migraines, constipation, intestinal disorders, gallbladder/liver conditions…
Improving digestion and elimination of toxic substances
Increasing circulation of blood and lymph and Decreasing inflammation
Enhancing fertility along with liver and immune function
Lubricating ligaments and Decreasing pain
Promoting tissue healing

Even though it’s long and includes many benefits, this list might be leaving out the most beneficial act of the castor oil: Whole-Body Activation by relaxing your nervous system.

The term castor oil pack is a fancy label to application of the oil on the skin, covering with a cotton towel or a flannel cloth and topping with a hot water bottle or a heating pad.

And yes! You can apply your pack on your liver, on your chest, on any sore joint and basically anywhere on your body including your belly button, with one caveat – the understanding that this will provide local lubrication of the treated tissue and nothing beyond! This lubrication will stimulate the applied tissue and encourage it to become engaged in its own healing, which is truly wonderful, and I do it all the time.

BUT…

What if castor oil packs can do more than local engagement? What if they can benefit you more than the described above?

What if Castor oil packs can provide a Whole-Body Activation by relaxing your nervous system, allowing your whole body to heal itself?

What is a Whole-Body Activation by relaxing your nervous system? This is a mechanism where your whole body becomes involved in its own healing, starting from shifting your autonomic nervous system into its parasympathetic deep relaxed state, and following through with a systemic transformation in every cell of your body.

How can you get this benefit?

Simple!!!

This activation will take place when you apply the castor oil pack on your entire belly – in the area from the edge of your ribcage to the pubic hair.

When applying the castor oil pack on the belly, the oil lubricates and stimulates all the tissues, organs and systems in this region. Along with that, the heat draws the blood vessels up closer to the skin as they vasodilate, and oil is being absorbed into the blood circulation as well, thus distributed through the whole body.

Lubricating and stimulating organs as the small intestine, bladder, colon, liver, uterus, which are part of systems that are inhibited when your body is under stress (when your autonomic nervous system functions at its sympathetic / fight-or-flight state), signals the nervous system to shift to the deep relaxed state – parasympathetic state.

Surprisingly enough, internal processes are very similar to the external world. You can think of the autonomic nervous system as expressing itself in one of two possible responses: War or Peace.

War response relates to the sympathetic state of your autonomic nervous system or the fight-or-flight state. When in war, your body is concerned with only one thing – survival. Every action it takes is meant to keep you standing on your own two feet. Nothing else, regardless to how much your body needs to compromise to accommodate it!! Your body may not even know that something is wrong, simply because it doesn’t have the energetic budget to check what is happening.

Peace response relates to the parasympathetic state of your autonomic nervous system or the rest-and-digest state. When in peace, the energetic budget opens, providing the means to detect and correct what needs your attention.

Bringing your nervous system to the parasympathetic state provides a Whole-Body Activation, which will create the environment for your body to start healing itself, no matter what conditions you are suffering from.

In my personal opinion, a Whole-Body Activation is the most important benefit of the castor oil packs. I have witnessed and experienced so many miraculous healings just from applying the castor packs on the entire belly.

Now sit back and imagine how wonderful it would be to combine it all – apply a castor pack on your belly for a Whole-Body Activation and add as many other castor packs as you wish on any area that needs your attention, for local engagement of the tissue to heal.