Samantha Mackay on mapping our trauma and chronic illness histories as a pathway to embodied healing

How can we begin to make connections between somatic ailments and deeper ruptures in our mind, spiritual and emotional bodies as a way of tending to inter-body dissonance when dominant healthcare spaces struggle to connect the dots for us? In what ways can alternative healthcare professionals and psychotherapists help us map out our illness and trauma histories to provide specialised treatment that serves to our individual needs rather than following one-size-fits-all treatment frameworks?

Today we are joined by Samantha Mackay. Samantha is a personal development coach at Individuo, incorporating the Enneagram into her integrative approach to inner work. She came to this work through a journey of recovering from chronic pain, illness and anxiety and discovering that in order to shift her pain she needed to master a range of skills that strengthened her inner resilience. With that, she could move inwards, to find the stillness needed to stay with, and release, her most painful imprints. On her multi-year journey of recovery, Samantha has learnt that some treatments act like a short term bandaids and others provided more permanent healing. She incorporates the Enneagram into her work for this very reason; it helps us invest our time, energy and resources into inner work that provides true relief.  

In this episode, Samantha and Agrita explore the problematic internalisation of productivity culture in dominant healthcare and the ways that we as individuals can resist this cultural paradigm through allowing themselves permission to attend to signs of deeper emotional and spiritual ruptures which are emerging on their physical bodies. We do this by examining the Enneagram as a tool for adults to begin to map out their trauma and illness histories with a certified Enneagram practitioner as an alternative approach to convention psychotherapy which often requires patients to work from their traumas up to internalised patterns/behaviours. By working from measurable behavioural patterns that can be categorised into types, the Enneagram breaks away from expectations of patients knowing how to use language to describe their difficulties to working to break open cycles of internalised behaviours in order get to the root of their problems, at a pace which feels comfortable for them.

Find out more about Samantha's work at individuo.life.

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