My Story: The Beginning of The Wellness Journey Club

Read the story of how the passing of Christina's mother opened up a new and unexpected path.

Hi there, Christina here. Welcome to my story of how The Wellness Journey Club came to be. There were so many things that ultimately guided me here but always with the intention of creating a better wellness model and to create a culture that was positive, inclusive and empowering.

However, things did not start out this way for me, that's for sure. The first step in my path was becoming a nurse. I trained in the conventional allopathic model was extremely focused on the science. Using science to guide and ground sound decision making based on the principles of the scientific method. Testing assumptions. Replicating results for validity. Digging deep into the molecular mechanisms that drove biology and focusing on which pathways various pharmaceuticals enhanced or inhibited to help support healing of the body.

And then a few things happened that were confusing to me. Although I was still firmly entrenched in the allopathic paradigm at the time, I remember asking more experienced clinicians in the hospital about blood work of patients. Many times when I asked about values being out of range, I would get the same response: "Oh that's not important" but in my mind I was always thinking but it's not normal, it's not optimal so this has to mean something, right?

As I continued with my clinical rotations, I took a course in my last year of nursing school that opened my eyes for the first time to other complementary modalities. I remember being fascinated by these, so much so that I sought them out and joined many on-campus organizations to get hands-on experiences and see for myself what these were all about. I wanted to have a deep understanding verses just a theoretical understanding. I so distinctly remember at the time thinking: "Wow, these are all pretty amazing and everything but let's get back to the real stuff, the hard science."

Years later, hilariously thanks to a radio ad, I ended up interviewing for a job working for a small biotech company that had one medication on the market at the time. I continued taking on various roles within the pharmaceutical industry always focused in one way or another on clinician and patient education about disease state, product information and, of course the science.

After more than a decade working in the Medical Affairs function (which is a non-promotional, science-based function within the industry), my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She and I have always been extremely close and, at this point she had been living with me for the last few years. Like many people who face end of life decisions for themselves or their loved ones, my family and I cast a wide net to see what options there were to help her stay comfortable and perhaps even heal in spite of a grim prognosis. Since my sister and I are extremely curious by nature and also very open-minded, nothing (and I mean nothing) was off the table. Like many who have faced similar circumstances, we also had our fair share of dissent among our family in terms of what was the best path for my grandmother and that was difficult to manage in addition to the emotional toll her diagnosis had on us all. It was during this time that I was introduced to the Bengston Method, which is a modality that has been researched in the preclinical setting in cancer. I thought it was interesting but, for numerous reasons we did not fully pursue this option.

Once my grandmother passed, there was no time to grieve. I had an almost 2 year old and a 9 year old to look after, in addition to a full time job which included frequent business travel overseas. It was a busy time for sure...and then my mom got sick. My mom was a very private person especially as it related to her personal health. She had two daughters who were nurses but never spoke to either of us about anything that might have been out of the ordinary with her health. So, you can imagine the complete shock when talking to the ER physician many states away and he said: "Your mother is very sick, we are admitting her to the ICU." He didn't know I was a nurse and it didn't matter because that was all I needed to hear to jump on the next plane to see her. I spent that week at the hospital with her asking a million questions to the doctors and nurses but we still weren't sure what was going on. There is so much more to this story but, for brevity, we ended up flying her here to Boston going straight from the airport to the hospital where she had emergency surgery within 12 hours of touch-down at Logan. It was a whirlwind to say the least. She pulled through the surgery and we finally had a diagnosis: endometrial cancer. At this point, she was so far along that her prognosis was not good. After taking a lot into consideration, we discharged her from the hospital back to my home and into hospice care.

Remembering the Bengston research, we decided to have my mom treated remotely (Note: anyone who has studied quantum physics or has experience with a number of biofield modalities that can be used remotely can attest to this choice but it does seem a bit "out there" if you have never been exposed to any of this before). This remote treatment meant that we had a practitioner many states away treating my mom with the Bengston Method. The fact that we had her treated remotely is an important point here because, in her case, she had no idea that this treatment was even happening. We had her treated remotely 2 days a week and always on different days of the week. I decided to start keeping track of how much and how often she requested pain medication, since I was the one administering it to her anyway. I thought it would be a good way to informally measure if the Bengston treatments were doing anything at all. I tracked this for 8 weeks until the time that she passed and I was amazed to see that the day after each remote session, she had a 50-70% reduction in need for pain medication. Was this the gold-standard of clinical trial design? No, absolutely not but it was an amazing final gift that she left me.

I have always said that if I had continued working in practice as a nurse, I would want to be a hospice nurse. Like a birth, I have always found something sacred with end of life care and, here with my mom, as emotionally difficult as it was, I was grateful to be able to be there for her and to be able to provide her as much comfort as possible in those final days. As many hospice nurses will tell you, if you pay close enough attention when someone who you care about passes away, there is always a final gift that they leave you. In this case, my mom left me such an amazing gift: witnessing for myself that her remote treatments had a tangible impact was exactly the push I needed to pique my curiosity and allow myself to turn my attention, for the first time since nursing school, back into the world of the unconventional, or as I like to call it, not-yet-mainstream modalities for wellness.

Serendipitously, later that year, I was introduced to the world of functional medicine and I loved how this paradigm was focused on root causes of illness and on optimal wellness. I became a super fan for sure! I learned as much as I could, attended many continuing education workshops and followed the certification path with the Institute for Functional Medicine. The clinicians I met along the way were amazing and open-minded across all disciplines. They are a truly passionate group and all have stories of how the application of functional medicine principles has significantly and positively impacted their health and the health of their patients.

In addition to functional medicine, for the following 4 years, I immersed myself into researching, studying and practicing as much as I could with anything and everything alternative. This led me to a much more thorough understanding of the framework of energy medicine modalities and also their inherent differences. Among other things, I became a Reiki Master and teacher, I immersed myself into the Eden Energy Method, I learned Healing Touch, I did a clinical rotation at an alternative oncology center in Mexico, and so much more.

My biggest takeaway was this: each and every paradigm has its place. Each have their strengths and each have areas that need support. Most importantly though, I realized that there was no truly integrated wellness model that leveraged the strengths of each model while supporting the areas that could be strengthened. That was the seed that started The Wellness Journey Club.

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The Wellness Journey Club is here to help you navigate through your questions about complementary and alternative options. We have created a new wellness model integrating the best parts of many modalities. Our goal is to make alternative options and complementary options accessible to everyone in an educated, fun way.

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