I’m standing outside in the cold winter night, looking up at the stars before I walk in to see my mom.
The air is sharp. It’s quiet. And I find myself taking a slow breath before opening the door—because I can feel, deep in my body, that something important is unfolding, even if I don’t yet know exactly what it is.
My mom is 89. She’s inside a skilled nursing facility after injuring her hip. And as I stand there under the night sky, I have a very clear knowing: we’re at a crossroads.
There’s something that’s been coming back into my awareness lately.
It’s something I’ve lived very deeply in the past—and if I’m honest, something I’d drifted a bit away from. But in this moment, it returns with clarity and force, and I feel called to share it because I truly believe it is the linchpin of healing.
That linchpin is this:
Owning your own healing.
This reminder came through my mom.
The day after Christmas, my mom—who is 89—injured her hip. She couldn’t walk. Not even one step.
She was transported to the emergency room, where she spent a long night, followed by several days in the hospital, and then weeks in a skilled nursing facility.
As you can imagine, this was frightening.
But what worried me most wasn’t just her hip.
My mom has a long history of myalgic encephalitis. As I watched her, I could see familiar warning signs emerging: she was pale, exhausted, and not sleeping well. Her nervous system was under constant assault—people in and out of her room at all hours, other patients in pain, noise throughout the night.
And because she was in a skilled nursing facility, she couldn’t do many of the things she normally relies on to stay well. She couldn’t take all of her supplements. She couldn’t eat the foods she usually eats. She couldn’t control her environment or her routines.
I could feel it in my body:
If this continues, she’s going to crash.
And then we would be dealing with much more than a hip injury.
Here’s the truth I had to face:
I had very little power in that environment.
And the only person who truly did have power was my mom.
She couldn’t supplement her way out of this. She couldn’t optimize her environment. She couldn’t override the rules of the facility.
What she could do was take ownership of her healing.
Thankfully, this wasn’t foreign to her. My mom has been a meditator for decades. She and my dad taught healing prayer touch in the 1990s. She’s turned her health around multiple times in her life. And she is deeply willing to take action when action is needed.
So I had what I would call a loving—but very direct—conversation with her.
I told her what I was seeing.
That as an empathic person, her system was wide open. She was absorbing the pain, fear, and nervous system dysregulation of everyone around her. And if that continued, she was at real risk of a deeper relapse.
I told her plainly: if she wanted to get out of that facility—and more importantly, if she wanted to prevent a crash—she needed to pull all of her energy back in.
I reminded her that every cell in her body is hers.
Her nervous system.
Her emotional field.
Her energetic field.
And that no one else could do this work for her.
I asked her to reinterpret the sounds around her—not as danger, but as love. As people being cared for. As healing happening all around her.
I asked her to return to the practices that had always helped her find her center:
• Doing her art, which is how she finds balance and peace
• Returning to meditation and healing prayer
• Putting on headphones and listening to music
• Looking out the window at the trees
• Closing her eyes and imagining walking on the beach at our old cabin with our childhood dog, Fritz
And I asked her to keep coming back to her center—again and again—every time fear arose, every time her nervous system became dysregulated.
That night, when I left, I felt something rare and sacred.
I remember thinking:
That was good medicine.
The next morning, I woke up to a family text from my mom.
She wrote that she was feeling amazing. That she had started a new art project—Zentangle drawings combined with quotes from a book she was reading. That she felt joyful. That she felt supported. That she felt good.
I can’t fully describe the relief and gratitude that washed over me.
From that point on, she stabilized. Then she improved.
When I visited her, she was calm. Centered. Strong.
She said, “I’m okay. I can be here as long as I need to. I’m healing.”
A few days ago, she was discharged. She’s moving back into independent living today.
And honestly—she looks amazing.
Watching this unfold with my mom brought something else into sharp focus for me.
I’ve seen this moment again and again—in my patients, and in my own life.
There is a very real difference between doing all the right things and truly owning your healing.
Ownership isn’t about doing it alone. And it’s not about refusing support, treatments, practitioners, or tools.
Ownership is a knowing.
It’s the moment you stop searching for the thing that will finally fix you—and instead settle into a deep, embodied certainty:
I’m going to figure this out.
When I look back at my own healing journey, the biggest shifts didn’t come from adding more protocols. They came from this internal orientation change.
I remember standing in the Ashland Food Co‑op years ago, in the middle of a frightening and confusing health crisis after a miscarriage, looking at the herbs on the shelf. And I knew—calmly and clearly—that I was going to fix this. That my body, the plants, and my intuition were going to work together. And they did.
Years later, when I was recovering from chronic fatigue, limbic retraining ended up being the final piece that brought me not just back to baseline, but beyond it. And again, it wasn’t just that I did the exercises. It was that I knew—this is the thing that’s going to carry me through.
That knowing changes everything.
From that place, healing becomes less confusing. There is less self‑doubt. Less second‑guessing every decision. The next right step becomes clearer, not because there are fewer options—but because your nervous system is no longer stuck in searching and fear.
I’ll be honest: this is something I’m recommitting to right now, too. As I enter this new year, I can see places where I get to take even deeper ownership of my own vitality and wellbeing.
Maybe this sense of ownership is already strong for you.
Or maybe this is an edge—an invitation to take it one step further.
Not by doing more.
But by trusting more deeply.
Trusting that you have the strength, the capacity, and the wisdom inside you to figure this out. And from that place, allowing the right supports, practices, and tools to meet you.
Here’s to you in this new year.
Here’s to a life with more clarity, more vitality, and more ease.
With so much love and gratitude for being on this journey together,
Dr. Jenny Tufenkian, ND