God wants us to be healthy in body and spirit so we can live a full life and serve our purpose. You need to begin reigning in your body to reach your potential. In this episode, Amy Killingsworth applies the seven pillars of Rise to Reign to bodily health. She discusses how each pillar affects aspects of your physical health and how to heal yourself. Listen in and be inspired to take care of your body.

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Reigning In Your Body

We are talking about the physical bodies. If you’ve been following along with me, I have explained several times what the Rise to Reign framework is. Overall, it is a framework for healing your life. I’ve identified in coaching, speaking and working with teams and people for years a variety of issues, problems, pain, hurts and suffering that shows up in life. It’s an overall life healing system. What that is are seven pillars, seven keys or seven principles applied to seven categories. We have covered the seven principles prior to this show. I’ve covered all of them. Some of them took more than one episode. Some of them took one episode. The principles of the Rise to Reign framework are identity, sovereignty, amnesty, integrity, polarity, which is male and female, vulnerability and generosity.

What we do is we take those seven concepts and apply them individually to seven categories of your life. If you have problems in life, blocks or things that are causing you suffering or in the way of you accomplishing your purpose or enjoying your life, it’s going to fall into one of these seven categories. They are body, soul or the Hebrew concept of heart, which is the human personality, which is a complex of mind, will and emotions. Also, spirit, relationships, finances, creativity and calling. Those are the seven categories of your life, body, soul, spirit, relationships, finances, creativity and calling. What we do is we take the seven pillars or the seven keys and we apply them to the seven categories for healing.

Remember the tagline of the show is, “God wants you healed so you can wholeheartedly live your purpose and love your life.” The calling is the last category because as you bring these other six categories into alignment, your body, soul, spirit, relationships, finances and creativity, your calling takes care of itself. What I see most often is people looking for their purpose and calling. The way to do that is to work on healing your life, especially your inner life, your emotions and your thoughts. The relationships, the finances and the creativity start in the calling, and the purpose starts taking care of themselves. Once you adjust the inside, the outside takes care of itself. I have arranged the categories in ascending order. If you imagine a pyramid, the longest and widest bottom of the pyramid would be the body.

We have to get our physical health and our physical well-being straightened out before we can approach any of these other categories. Let me explain that and that’s what this show is about. If you’re talking about the next category, which is soul or heart, which is the mind, will and emotions. If we’re talking about mental health specifically anxiety and depression, a huge contributor to anxiety and depression is in the physical health of the body. We have the gut-brain connection, which is through the enteric nervous system, wherein our gut, most of our feel-good chemicals, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin are manufactured in the gut. If we have a gut that’s unhealthy, we’re going to have a mind and a brain that’s unhealthy. That is a huge contributor. An unhealthy gut is a huge contributor to things like ADHD, anxiety and depression.

Where I got started in my career as an entrepreneur is in health coaching. A big thing that people would come to me for a lot of the time is neurological stuff because if you know my story, I had a son that had a neurological issue. He was prescribed drugs, but the drugs came with all kinds of side effects. I didn’t want to give them to him. I found a way and put myself through a crash course to find a way to heal him without drugs, but with food, lifestyle and supplementation. Along that same time, I had a disastrous health issue and had to do the same for myself. As I began to heal the problems that I was experiencing physically, I noticed my mental state getting so much better and anxiety resolving lifelong. Even panic disorder that I had been medicated for in my teens and twenties is disappearing.

 

It’s interesting to me how it’s like a mobile that hangs over like in a baby’s bed. There’s a bunch of different pieces and if they are tangled up and sometimes if you adjust that top bit, everything else falls into line. I want you to imagine the categories like that. The order we go in is very intentional. When we do Rise to Reign immersion, this is the order that we go in when I work with you as a coach. When my team works with you on the Rise to Reign framework, we go in a very specific order because we can’t address the thoughts until your nervous system is physically calmed down. We can’t address your relationships until your thinking is clear. I hope you see how this builds on each other. That’s a lot of intros because this specific episode is about the body. I’m not going to have time to handle it in the detail that we do in our program and our practice. I’m going to give you an overview of what this looks like so that you can begin thinking this way.

You Are A Tri-Part Being

You are a tri-part being. It’s super important to realize is that you have three equal but distinct parts to you. You are a spirit. You have always been and you always will be eternally, but when you incarnate into the Earth, you are given a body. You have a body, you live in a body and your spirit lives in a body. You then have a soul, which is the Hebrew concept of heart or the soul is like the mind, will and emotions. It’s the complex of your personality or the human personality which is your mind, will and emotions. You are a spirit. You have a soul, which is your mind, will and emotions, and you live in a body.

Identity And Your Health

We’re talking about the body that you live in. We’re going to apply the Rise to Reign pillars to each category and that creates a framework. It’s like a grid. We have a document and across the top are the seven pillars and across the side are the seven categories. We go and apply them to each area. I’ll show you what this looks like in an overview. The first Rise to Reign pillar is identity. The definition of identity is the condition of being a certain person. My identity is Amy. It’s also mom, a set of characteristics by which you’re known. It’s also a coach, consultant and teacher. You get these labels and monikers by which you’re known. There is a physical characteristic to this too like your physical identity.

You’re female, tall, short, dark hair, no hair. Your bodily identity has to do with your physical characteristics, how you’re known, how you’re seen, and how you see yourself. It’s also helpful to apply the archetypes. The archetypes of identity for Rise to Reign purposes are the prisoner, the slave, the princess or the prince, depending on gender, and the queen or the king. We look at bodily identity. We want to ask ourselves, “How does a queen treat her body? How does a king treat his body?” That’s the standard we apply. How does a queen eat? How does a queen exercise? How does a queen supplement or make love? What does a queen move around in the world as a queen in her body?

That gives you an idea of the standard that applies. You guys have probably read that I mentioned it before but I love the Elizabeth movies where Cate Blanchett played Queen Elizabeth. She becomes queen when she’s a young woman like a teenager, barely. She’s the queen when she’s struggling to find her place and where she fits. She’s a female and she’s got all these men that are answering to her. There’s this one scene where she’s a new queen and she wakes up in the morning and here comes the priest. He wants to check out her sheets because they’re logging her bodily functions. She’s so offended by it. He explains to her, “Your body’s not your own. You’re the sovereign. Your body belongs to the state and this is the matter of state.”

That’s a real wake-up call for her but I love the concept of that because when you are a queen or a king, the pinnacle of the Rise to Reign pyramid or triad is your calling. When you are a queen or a king, you’re very focused on your mission and you know what your purpose and your calling are. You’re focused on accomplishing that. Your body is a servant to that. It becomes not your own and this is throughout the Bible in that my body belongs to God, to Christ and to my purpose on Earth. The choices then that you make with your body are different than if you were maybe a slave to pleasure or you are a slave to comfort.

God wants you healed so you can wholeheartedly live your purpose and love your life. Click To Tweet

There’s a scripture in the Bible where Paul says that he beats his body into submission to make it do what it needs to do to get the job done, to get the mission done, to get the calling done. I’m going to talk about this but I feel rest is important and I am not advocating that you beat yourself into submission in that way because we can get way out of balance without resting, and working from a place of not knowing who we are and trying to be significant, and trying to produce results for the sake of being accepted or loved. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I do want to point out is the idea that when you recognize who you are, the queen and the king are your true identity before you believed lies about yourself.

When you recognize who you truly are, how do you behave? How do you treat your body? It doesn’t become like, “Shall I have that drink of alcohol? Shall I have that donut?” It’s like, “What does this mean to the mission? What does this mean to my purpose? What does this mean to my calling? Is this going to contribute to the energy that I need? Is this going to contribute to the mental space that I need to be in?” You become intentional based on your identity. Another story that I’ll share as far as identity goes is when I was getting ready to go through some changes in my personal life and having to face the fact that I was looking at a divorce. I also had to look at the fact that I was drinking alcohol, and how I was using alcohol to numb some pain. I needed to feel that I could make some changes in my life because pain is always an indicator.

When you’re in pain and when you’re “suffering”, that’s an indicator that something is out of alignment and something needs to change. When you use a substance or an activity to numb yourself in that pain, you don’t end up or at least it’s delayed for you to face what is needed to face, and that thing gets worse. If it’s your money and you are not looking at it and spending on credit cards, eventually that’s going to catch up with you and you’re going to find yourself in bankruptcy. If it’s food and the way that you’re eating, and you’re not paying attention, then you’re not looking at the, “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to back it up and get back to the drinking story.” I had to make the decision to not drink anymore, to give up alcohol so I could get sober and focus on what’s needed to happen.

I knew that I needed to feel the pain that I was in so that I would have the tools and the motivation to make the changes that I needed to make, which were terrifying for me. I knew that if I had that crutch or that numbing agent, that I wouldn’t do that. I tried for a couple of months and I wouldn’t consider myself an addict or an alcoholic. I didn’t go to any treatment or have any withdrawal symptoms or anything like that but it was an emotional tool that I was using. I hope you can understand the difference. A few times, I was like, “I’m going to drink less.” I ended up drinking less for a couple of days and then going right back to patterns.

I was like, “I’m going to not drink tonight.” I would go out to happy hour with my friends. They were all having drinks. I loved my red wine and I’ll have a glass. I haltered between I would wake up, I’d have a headache and I’d be like, “Never again.” Sure enough, the weekend would come and that would be what I did. I would go out drinking or not go out drinking. It was a part of my social activity. What I started to notice with self-awareness is that when I removed alcohol from my life, it left a lot of gaps. It was my reward system. If I did good and I launched a product or if I had a win in my business, I would always reward myself. If I got through a hard day, I would reward myself with alcohol.

 

It also made me feel sophisticated. At the time, I had smaller children and they were homeschooled. On a lot of days, I would have no interaction with other adult humans other than my children. At the end of the day, after they were in bed, I could sit down on the couch and have a glass of wine. It made me feel like an adult, like a sophisticated woman. That was part of why I use that to bolster that identity. It also was my crutch. If I was sad, it helped me feel better. If I was anxious, it helped me calm down. That’s what I thought. What I realized as I gave up alcohol and began to embrace sobriety is that it was taking so much more than it was giving in the form of energy and emotional backlash.

When you drink for a moment, you feel good for maybe twenty minutes but then it was a downward spiral from there. You don’t sleep well. You get dehydrated. You wake up with a headache and feeling yuck and puffy the next day, and then it’s hard on your liver. You think the benefits are outweighing the drawbacks but they aren’t necessarily. I realized that I had to get sober to realize it was taking more for me than it was giving. The way that I had to handle this is to decide that I wasn’t going to drink anymore. I had to not change focus on my behavior of drinking because that wasn’t working. I had to focus on my identity and I had to anchor in an identity as a non-drinker.

That meant that I made different choices and it meant that I arranged my lifestyle. My whole social life was arranged around drinking activities. Now I do not care if people are drinking. I’ll go out and I’ll go to happy hour, parties or weddings. I don’t care if other people are drinking and I can have more fun sober than I ever did when I was drinking because I’m happy now. I’m integrated and emotionally well. I feel good being sober, and I don’t want to mess with that. In order to get there, when we are looking especially as a coach or a consultant when somebody comes to me with a problem, we have to identify where they want to go. For me in this case, it was I want to not drink. We have to identify where you are and then we have to decide on a plan or a strategy to close that distance.

I wanted to go from drinking 2 or 3 nights a week and every weekend to not drinking at all. How do you close that distance? The way that I did it was to change my identity to a non-drinker. Instead of I’m not drinking tonight, there’s room for maybe I am tomorrow night, and what’s going to happen then? I had to start thinking of myself as a non-drinker. How does a non-drinker behave? They don’t drink ever under any circumstances for any reason. It’s not a part of who they are. I became rearranged. I started to be able to rearrange my lifestyle to where I had a different reward system.

I had a different way to unwind at the end of the day, and a different way to connect with my friends. I got into exercise and I got focused on my work. I got involved in emotional healing because now I didn’t have a crutch to numb the feelings that were constantly trying to bubble up and be felt, seen and heard. That is an example of how your identity as a non-drinker. If you’re going to apply it to exercise, I consider myself a CrossFitter. I’m not in any way going to the games or having any success as a competitor or anything like that but I do it five times a week because that is part of my identity. I am a CrossFitter. To close that gap between where you are and where you want to be, there’s identity involved. Where your body is concerned when you make bodily choices, how does a queen or a king treat their body? We’re talking about food, hydration and rest.

I have a presentation. I’m not getting into the nitty-gritty of health. I have a whole business on health coaching still. It’s called SoveREIGN Wellness. You can go to SovereignWellness.Solutions and get information on that. I have a masterclass that goes over the five pillars of health and it’s based on reigning in life. If you want details on what to do with your health, go to SovereignWellness.Solution/Masterclass, and you can watch a free presentation there. I’m not getting into that in this show. I want to deal with the perspective and the framework.

You can give your authority away, but you can't give your responsibility away. Click To Tweet

Your bodily identity is a set of characteristics by which you’re known. It’s the condition of being a certain person, how you see yourself, how others see you, who you are, and then archetypes, prisoners, slave, princess, queen. The next pillar or key that we apply to the seven categories is sovereignty. I have so much to say about this in our current timeframe or what’s going on in our world. I’ll try to make it brief and let you come to your own conclusions because I am not here to tell you what to think. My goal here is to teach you how to think and how to be a powerful person. When we’re looking at bodily sovereignty, I’m not necessarily going to tell you what I think or what my opinion is. I do want to advocate for consent. When I did sovereignty, I did a whole series on it and I did a separate show on the mechanics of consent. That is important. If you haven’t read that, it is episode number four. It was released on June 29th, 2021. You can go back and read that. It’s important.

Physical Health And Bodily Sovereignty

What is sovereignty? It’s supreme authority or rule, in this case, over your own body. It’s also self-governance. It’s this robust concept of radical responsibility. We’re at a time in history where we need to take radical responsibility for our health. All of these government mandates that are coming down that are forcing medical interventions are inhumane. They’re just not in line with sovereign beings created in the image of God. If you want medical intervention, if you want to take a certain therapy, drug or whatever, I bless you and release you to do what you have decided in your heart that is best for you.

What we have is a bunch of people who are blindly following expert advice and not thinking for themselves and not exercising sovereignty where their body is concerned. Especially with injection, anything that crosses the barrier of your skin, that is penetration. It’s penetrating into your body in something that is forced and mandated to do that. That puts different RNA, different proteins, chemicals, adjuvants, and immunotherapy situations into your bloodstream that will be with you sensibly for the rest of your life. That’s a huge decision and it needs to be one that is made between you and the Holy Spirit with discernment, and not by a governing body that decides that everybody’s going to get this therapy or this thing.

It’s important that you take radical responsibility for your health because you can give your authority away, but you can’t give your responsibility away. You can say, “The CDC recommends” or, “My doctor said,” but if you have a side effect or if you have an illness, you’re the one that’s going to be in bed. You’re going to be off work and missing time with your kids. My point is to be informed and it’s important to have consent. If you give your authority away, that’s your choice. Don’t do that. If you do give your authority away, understand that you can’t give your responsibility away. At the end of the day, you will bear the responsibility. That’s bodily sovereignty.

Forgive Your Body

The next one is a little bit more of an emotional aspect that we have in the categories. Amnesty is a robust idea of forgiveness and the definition is to grant a general part into forgetting or overlooking an offense or class of offenses. Amnesty is a robust concept of forgiveness. What does this have to do with your body? How do we apply amnesty to your body? I love this topic because many people are at war with their bodies. If you don’t believe me, especially women, go take off all your clothes and go stand in front of a full-length mirror and listen to what your self-talk does. You will start picking everything apart. I know this because I live it. Your internal dialogue and your inner bully is going to be like, “This is saggy, dimply, hairy, too fat, too skinny, too tall, and too whatever.” It’s criticizing and picking every little thing apart.

 

How do we forgive our body is to heal those thoughts one by one and offer those up for healing. In the forgiveness framework, we talk about acknowledging the feeling. I feel like I’m fat, ugly or whatever your inner bully is saying, but I’m willing not to and show me this from a healed perspective. We want to close that gap from bullying ourselves over our body and it’s not just appearance too. As a health coach, I meet with people who are struggling with things like infertility or who are auto-immune. They feel like their body is betraying them and working against them.

It’s important to forgive those thoughts. Your body is never working against you. For one thing, it’s always working for you. Even when a symptom shows up, it’s a message that needs to be paid attention to. Pain is a messenger that needs to be paid attention to, but it’s important to be able to offer forgiveness. Process those thoughts and offer them up for forgiveness to the Holy Spirit to be able to move past the criticism and the war, and sometimes even the hatred that you have towards your body because that anchors in physical illness.

Bodily Integrity

What does bodily integrity look like? Integrity for our purposes is the quality or condition of being whole or undivided. It’s an idea of completeness. For Rise to Reign, we say that integrity is the outside matching the inside or telling the truth without manipulation. Where this comes into play is what are all of the nagging little symptoms that you are ignoring about your body and your health? What are all the messages that your body is sending to you that you are not listening to or that you’re maybe attributing to old age or whatever? I got slapped upside the head when I was 36 years old. I was dealing with all stuff leading up to this.

I had mentioned anxiety and depression in my younger years. I also had digestive problems and I was in pain. As I started to have children and went through pregnancies, it was getting worse. I had headaches every day. I was on 800 milligrams of ibuprofen because everything hurt. I was so inflamed but I didn’t know what that was until I landed in the hospital after my third child was born with congestive heart failure. They were telling me he had less than five years to live. It was a cocktail of things that I won’t go into but I had severe adrenal, almost failure and insufficiency. I had an underperforming thyroid. It was a bunch of emotional and mental strain that I was under. By the time it happened, it was too late.

Thankfully, I have also made a miraculous recovery. I would call it a miraculous recovery and I don’t have heart problems anymore. That was several years ago but that’s the stuff that I’m talking about. Integrity is paying attention to your body’s messages without manipulation. We manipulate ourselves a lot where our health is concerned. Maybe you have pain when you’re urinating and you’re like, “That’s not that big of a deal. I’m not going to get that looked at.” You don’t go and get the exams that you’re supposed to get. You don’t keep up with your health care regimen or take your supplements because it isn’t that big of a deal. Take it from me as you ignore those signs and those symptoms, it can become a big deal fast. By then a lot of times, I don’t want to say it’s too late, but it’s harder to deal with when left alone.

The Polarity Of Your Body

Integrity is paying attention, being integrated, listening to your body, and taking action when your body gives you messages. Polarity, where it comes to the body is a pretty simple one. Polarity is the possession or manifestation of two opposing attributes, tendencies or principles. For Rise to Reign, it’s gender polarity. It’s masculine or feminine. What I want to talk about briefly with the body is this has to do with how do you dress? How do you move? How do you show up as a woman or as a man? You can go back to the episodes that we did on masculine and feminine qualities, and see maybe a dress with flowers on it that would make you feel more feminine. Maybe if you put some essential oils on, that would make you feel more feminine.

Your body never is working against you for one thing; it's always working for you. Click To Tweet

Pleasure is a feminine quality. It’s important for you to have pleasure as a woman. Men don’t usually have trouble being convinced of that but for women, it’s important for you to have pleasure, physical pleasure or sexual pleasure. Eating a piece of chocolate and enjoying that is pleasurable. For me, being in the ocean is one of the most physically pleasurable sensations. I love swimming in saltwater and being in the ocean is such a pleasure. What is it that brings you pleasure? You need to do that to fill up your feminine tank. For men, it is whatever it is that brings you pleasure. That physical pleasure, mental and emotional pleasure that is important within limits. It’s important to fill up on that and to identify which side of the pole you occupy. For a man, it might increase his masculinity to supplement testosterone. This is a big one that I see a lot in my health coaching practice. When men start losing what they would consider their libido or their virility, they need a little bit of testosterone supplements.

Sometimes women need testosterone for libido. Seeing your natural healthcare practitioner about some hormonal balance goes a long way to helping you occupy your side of the pole. Hormones are huge in that. I know I’m racing through this, but I just want to give you a broad overview. We’re launching the Rise to Reign immersion that you can get in the coaching program. If you want to do a deep dive, we take you through it step by step.

Vulnerability Is Not Weakness

The last two are vulnerability and generosity. Those are more emotional and non-tangible concepts. As far as vulnerability goes, I’ll give you the definition, uncertainty, risk, emotional exposure, the unstable feeling we get when we step out of our comfort zone or do something that forces us to loosen control. Vulnerability is not weakness, but it’s our most accurate measure of courage. How can you get out of your comfort zone with your body? I was talking to a mom at my kid’s school and I was like, “You should come to CrossFit with me.” She was like, “I could never do CrossFit.” When I hear that as a coach, I’m like, “If you can’t do it, you must do it.”

What is that thing that you want to learn to do? For me, playing tennis is vulnerable because I’m bad at it, but I go and I do the drills. Sometimes they do match plays and it’s way outside of my comfort zone, so as golf. I’m not good at that either but I love doing it because it’s outside of my comfort zone. It’s something that I can do that makes me most vulnerable. If you’re always doing the thing that you’re good at, that’s great but if you can get outside of your comfort zone, that’s where you grow. How can you get outside of your comfort zone physically? It’s important. I’m always wanting to find my edge because otherwise, I’m stagnant and I’m not growing if I’m not finding my edge. If I get good at something, then I need to find a way to challenge myself and that is bodily vulnerability.

Be Generous To Yourself

The last one is bodily generosity, which is the quality of giving unselfishly usually to others. In this case, we’re going to ask, how can you be generous to your body? I can tell you all the things that I do. I get facials and massages in the categories of generosity or money, material, objects, time, and then the generosity of spirit. I love to do things like magnesium float tanks, baths, essential oils, supplements, good food and smoothies. I see my doctor and my naturopath regularly and make sure they get my blood drawn.

To me, there are not many things that are more impactful investments for your money than to spend it on your physical health. If you don’t have a lot of money, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be generous with your body. For one thing, it’s time. Most people are like, “I don’t have time to cook. I don’t have time to work out. I don’t have time.” One of the ways you can be generous with your body is to take the time to sleep eight hours, to go to bed, and enough time to get enough sleep and to drink water. You don’t need to make a magnesium float tank if you live near the ocean. You can go to float in the saltwater. You can find free ways to be generous with your body, with your time, and then the generosity of spirit. If you can treat yourself to a nice outfit, outing or activity, that’s also awesome.

My friends, that is an overview of the Rise to Reign framework, which is seven pillars applied to seven categories. We also covered the first category, which is the body and we will be getting into the next category, which is going to be a series. It is one of the things that I’m super excited about because my zone of genius is emotional healing. We’re going to be getting into that next episode. Thank you so much for reading and I will see you next episode.

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