By Adrienne MacIain, Ph.D.

“Establishing a healthy emotional connection to all places of well-being through balanced nourishment, daily movement, and inspired, empowered transformation can support the many complications of chronic illness.” 

-Crystal “C.D.” Grenier, Crystalize Your Health: Thriving Through Chronic Illness

Feeling the way we want to feel should be the simplest thing in the world. Yet, in so many ways, it is the most challenging, especially when you’re living with a serious illness.

Crystal Grenier learned the hard way about the intimate connection between our feelings and how we feel when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

“My already-healthy lifestyle with fairly good food choices and exercise had served me well, until that day of diagnosis,” says Crystal. That’s when she realized it takes more than just going through the motions of health and wellness; there’s a deeper emotional processing that needs to take place in order for healing to occur.

“I feel that cancer was brought to me as a message,” Crystal posits, “a place to pause and focus on my lack of internal happiness, my anger, my disappointments, etc., always showing up in competition, consistently looking and grasping for acknowledgment and acceptance of self and others.”

Crystal’s healing journey took her to places inside herself she hadn’t revisited in decades, allowing her to heal from the inside-out. 

“I have taken an internal deep-dive into myself to discover why I received breast cancer. In looking at my unstable stepfamily upbringing, my past relationships and unhealthy choices, my unprocessed grief from two tragic deaths (my father and half-sister), I needed to move through this process of uncovering my stuffed emotion accumulation to find a place of presence and awareness to address my emotions as they surface in a healthier way through nourishment, movement, and alchemy.

“In her latest book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown explains that the usual emotional suspects—happy, sad, afraid, and angry—are only a tip of the emotional iceberg,” explains Crystal, “and when life hands us a chronic illness, that iceberg goes deep. We step into uncertainty with too much to handle, we are stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, worried, avoiding the inevitable, holding dread, fear, and vulnerability. And those of us who haven’t practiced emotional wellness (tools to handle stress, social relations to others, healthy choices …) can sink even deeper into the holistic neglect that is manifesting into disease.”

That double-edged sword can, however, work to our advantage when we reclaim our emotions as a weapon of wellness, rather than a liability.

“Crystalize Your Health captures both sides of the emotional wellness coin,” says Crystal, “addressing the need for intentional awareness around nourishing and stimulating our body and mind, and providing tools to transform our emotions in a healthy way. I want to use my personal experience as a segue into the reality of obtaining a chronic illness, how to live with it, and stay in a place of healthy survival and feeling good.”

You see, stuffed emotions weren’t all Crystal found when she took that internal deep-dive. “Another personal healing revelation was to stop playing the blame-game. I have stopped blaming others for my own emotions, addressed and released my limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging stories. I am present and aware of my emotional processing, and can flow into my future with confidence and compassion for self and others.”

But it isn’t just Crystal’s experiences of emotional alchemy that are shared in this book. Crystal conducted interviews with other coaches, doctors, practitioners, trainers, etc. to share their stories of survival or present struggles with illness, and how their professional practices are holistically supporting others. 

“This book offers actionable advice from a range of individuals living with a serious medical condition through heartfelt conversations, stories providing the seeds of wisdom needed to cultivate a positive outlook and personal game plan to support emotional health and holistic healing,” explains Crystal. 

“I wrote this book for women over 40 who are thriving despite a chronic illness, those who are surviving like me, those who want to be proactive in middle age, and those who may be caring for a loved one that is struggling. I wanted to show them how our emotions, past and present, can affect our health, and to provide a range of holistic modalities to help ease the struggle of living with an illness.”

When asked about her mission, Crystal shares:

“I believe in a world where the current duality of traditional medicine vs. holistic health care no longer exists. A diagnosis may need a prescription or a treatment, however, natural modalities are available to increase a healthy outcome. My mission is to bring an awareness around the intricacies of emotional health and chronic illness, and how they can potentially intertwine with one another. This process will involve looking at the levels of balanced healing around nourishment (food, relationships, spiritual, mental, physical); movement (stretching, breathing, exercise); and alchemy (processing emotions, owning, naming, challenging & changing them). Implementing these levels of healing will help remove the emotional burden & guilt of illness, and promote stability, resilience, and optimism.”

Get your copy of her book today at Amazon & Barnes & Noble

Crystal is a holistic wellness consultant who helps women thrive despite a chronic illness so that they can cultivate awareness around emotional health and healing choices through her three pillars; nourishment, movement & alchemy by offering guidance through individual and/or group programs. 

“I am leading by example,” says Crystal, “I want my adult daughters to witness how to stay present, be aware, ask questions, seek answers, and make healthy choices so as to break the cycle of dysfunction and the potential to grow illness. As a breast cancer survivor, with a deep background in health and fitness, I have been given the tools to share intentional insight into alternative methods of self-acceptance, continued growth, and abundant living, and I am here to share those tools.”

Learn more and connect on social media with Crystal: www.linktr.ee/crystalg03 

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