From Trauma to Triumph: How to Heal Cancer, Anxiety, and Chronic Disease by Learning to Listen to Your Body
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 486 • Dr. Jen Hewson
When you’re making six figures as an education administrator, running crossfit classes, and looking fit on the outside, nobody expects you to fall apart. Dr. Jen Hewson had all the markers of success that society tells us matter. But at 43 years old, everything changed with a cancer diagnosis that forced her to ask the question nobody wants to face: what am I missing?
Her story isn’t about finding the perfect treatment. It’s about discovering that 90 percent of our health struggles aren’t about what we don’t know. They’re about what we’re refusing to feel. And it’s a message that could transform how you think about your body, your mind, and your entire approach to healing.
The High-Functioning Crisis: Looking Good While Falling Apart
Dr. Hewson grew up in poverty with a mother who was only 14 when she had her. She watched her mother struggle with money constantly, overspend, and then scramble to catch up. That pattern of financial stress and instability became deeply embedded in her nervous system from childhood. But instead of accepting that fate, Hewson became determined to achieve at the highest level possible so she would never live in that constant misery and poverty.
By her early forties, she had achieved remarkable external success. She had climbed to the top of what’s possible in education administration in Canada, earning high six figures. She looked fit. She was doing crossfit regularly. On the surface, everything appeared perfect.
But internally, she was a mess.
She was eating garbage despite her fitness routine. Her central nervous system was dysregulated. She experienced high amounts of anxiety and couldn’t sleep properly. She was drinking wine at five o’clock, smoking socially, and making choices that weren’t aligned with her wellbeing or her values. The body was sending signals. At first, they were small breadcrumbs. Then came the boulder.
At 43 years old, Dr. Hewson received a breast cancer diagnosis. The cancer had spread into her lymph nodes. What she didn’t know at the time was that her body had been trying to wake her up for years, and cancer was the breaking point that finally forced her to listen.
The Body Always Speaks: Learning to Hear What It’s Saying
When Dr. Hewson began working with a practitioner using a technology called the Avatar SC5, everything shifted. This system accesses the body’s meridian pathways using principles from Eastern medicine that date back over 5,000 years. Through this sophisticated testing, she discovered profound imbalances in her body that conventional blood work had completely missed.
She had dysbiosis in her gut. She had a leaky gut. Her liver wasn’t functioning well. Perhaps most significantly, her lymphatic system was barely running at all. And that lymphatic dysfunction had directly contributed to the cancer spreading into her lymph nodes.
The testing revealed something crucial: 90 percent of your health physiologically and biochemically is rooted in gut health. This isn’t metaphorical. This is measurable, observable reality. Your gut is your first brain. Your second brain is in your head. They’re connected by the vagus nerve, and they communicate constantly through an electrical and chemical dialogue that most of us have never learned to understand.
Dr. Hewson didn’t walk away from conventional medicine entirely. She incorporated some of it. But when she started seeing results from addressing her gut health, from balancing her body’s systems through natural medicines like minerals, herbs, and homeopathics, she became fascinated with root cause medicine and functional medicine. Within a year of her diagnosis, she had decided to retire early from her administrative position and dedicate herself to learning everything possible about how we truly heal: body, spirit, and soul.
The Three-Part Foundation of Real Healing
As a natural medicine doctor, Dr. Hewson now works with what she calls the Holy Trinity of healing: the body, the mind (which is your soul), and your spirit. Each one matters profoundly. Leave one out, and you’re just managing symptoms instead of healing at the source.
The body piece starts with nutrition and gut health. This is foundational. When you’re eating processed garbage and your gut is dysbiotic, your body is in survival mode. It’s not going to prioritize healing your nervous system or supporting your emotional health. It’s going to focus on basic functioning.
Once the body begins to come back into balance through proper nutrition, what becomes possible is hormone regulation. Your hormones tell your brain what neurotransmitters to produce. Dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, cortisol. They don’t balance without hormonal health. When cortisol is chronically elevated from stress, anxiety, or trauma, it essentially tells your body that survival mode is still the priority. The body relaxes the neurotransmitters that would help you feel peaceful, confident, and motivated. Serotonin drops, triggering anxiety. Dopamine drops, triggering low mood.
This is why high-stressed executives who are “crushing it” professionally often find themselves unable to sleep, constantly anxious despite outward success, and struggling with relationships they can’t understand why they’re sabotaging. The body is running an old program from a nervous system that never learned to feel safe.
Healing the Nervous System Through Breath and Heart Coherence
Dr. Hewson studied trauma-informed counseling through the HeartMath Institute, an organization that has spent decades researching how stress affects our physiology. What they’ve discovered is profound: most of our suffering comes from stress, anxiety, and fear. And stress doesn’t distinguish between a bear chasing you and the mental loop of “what if” that runs through your mind all day.
Your body doesn’t know the difference between those two threats. It responds with the same cortisol release. The same nervous system activation. The same contraction in your blood vessels and your heart. And that chronic contraction is what leads to AFib, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease that millions of people are medicated for, when the root cause is simply chronic stress.
But here’s what’s remarkable: you can shift your entire nervous system in two to three minutes using a simple breathing practice. In for five or six counts, out for five or six counts, while focusing on the heart as a piece of divine technology. That simple practice, done twice a day consistently, creates measurable changes in heart rate variability, blood pressure, and all the markers that doctors typically treat with medication.
When you lower cortisol through this practice, you’re addressing the root instead of blocking the symptom with a beta blocker. You’re teaching your nervous system that it’s actually safe to relax. And when your nervous system relaxes, your hormones balance. When your hormones balance, your neurotransmitters function properly. And suddenly, you’re sleeping. Your anxiety decreases. Your mood stabilizes. And you start to feel like yourself again.
The 90 to 10 Rule: Taking Responsibility for Your Healing
Dr. Hewson is clear about something that many practitioners won’t say directly: 90 percent of your health challenges are rooted in your own choices, your own stress responses, and your own refusal to take responsibility. The remaining 10 percent accounts for genetic mutations and chromosomal factors beyond your control.
But that 90 percent? That’s yours to change.
This doesn’t mean blaming yourself for being sick. It means recognizing that you have far more power in your healing than you’ve been led to believe. It means understanding that every choice you make around food, sleep, stress management, and emotional processing is either moving you toward health or away from it.
Most people don’t want to hear this. It’s easier to believe that healing is something that should happen to you, something a doctor should fix, something that requires a pill or a procedure. It’s harder to look in the mirror and say, “I’m the problem. And therefore, I’m also the solution.”
The Spiritual Piece: Disconnection as Disease
Perhaps the most profound insight Dr. Hewson shares is about spiritual disconnection. She wrote her PhD dissertation on the importance of spiritual connectedness in healing outcomes. What she found was staggering: people with some form of spiritual connection, faith, or belief in something bigger than themselves experienced between 80 to 94 percent better healing outcomes than those without that connection.
This isn’t about religion. It’s about whether you believe there’s something bigger than yourself that cares about you, that has a plan for you, or that you’re connected to. For some people, that’s Christianity or Buddhism or another religion. For others, it’s a sense of connection to nature, to the universe, or to a higher power they can’t quite name.
But the research is clear: people who are spiritually disconnected, who believe they’re completely self-reliant and separate from others, who have no connection to anything beyond themselves, suffer more. They heal more slowly. They carry more anxiety and depression.
Dr. Hewson talks about three levels of disconnection that create brokenness: disconnection from God or Spirit, disconnection from self (not knowing yourself), and disconnection from other (from each other). Most people have broken connections at all three levels.
What Real Healing Actually Looks Like
Real healing isn’t fast. It’s not a five-week course or a 30-day detox that fixes everything. It’s a lifetime of training to become the best version of yourself. Dr. Hewson uses the word “training” rather than “trying” because training implies a target and acknowledges that it takes time to get there.
When you address the gut, when you begin to regulate your nervous system, when you start making choices aligned with your values, the body responds. Within 30 to 60 days of genuine commitment, most people see significant improvements. But the deeper work, the spiritual work, the work of clearing generational trauma and learning to trust yourself again, that’s ongoing. That’s the work of a lifetime.
The people who succeed at finding lasting peace aren’t the ones who get it all right on the first try. They’re the ones who keep getting back up. They don’t give up. They don’t throw in the towel when they fail. They recognize that every setback is part of the process, and they keep training.
Taking Back Your Health Means Taking Back Your Life
Dr. Jen Hewson’s journey from a high-functioning, internally broken version of herself to a healed, integrated person who serves others from her own deep healing work is an invitation for all of us. It’s an invitation to stop pushing through. To start listening. To recognize that the body, mind, and spirit aren’t separate silos. They’re one integrated system, and what affects one affects all the others.
If you’re tired of the quick fixes. If you’re successful on the outside but struggling on the inside. If you’re ready to heal at the source instead of just managing symptoms, her work and her message are for you.
The future begins with individuals who take responsibility for their own healing and then extend that same compassion and love to those around them. That’s how we change the world. One healed person at a time.
Bio
Dr. Jen Hewson didn’t begin her work from a place of ease. She began it from a place of breaking.
Long before she became a Doctor of Natural Medicine or built Take Back Your Health, she was navigating deep personal healing — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
She learned firsthand what it feels like to function on the outside while falling apart on the inside… and what it takes to truly come back into alignment.
Her healing didn’t come from quick fixes or surface-level solutions. It came from learning how the body holds stress, how unresolved emotions affect health, and how spiritual disconnection quietly erodes vitality.
That journey changed everything — including how she now serve others.
Today, Dr Jen integrates root-cause medicine, nervous system regulation, and spiritual insights to support people who are tired of pushing through pain and ready to heal at the source. Her work with high-calibre executives is deeply personal, clinically grounded, and centered on restoring trust in the body and clarity in leadership.
Since 2019, she has shared this message on national stages and in transformational workshops with organizations such as Holistic Health Canada and the Canadian Conference Speakers Bureau, helping individuals and teams understand that sustainable success begins with self-leadership and self-care. Her recent published book called Gut Instincts: A Journey of Breaking, Healing and Returning home to God is not only her testimony but a blueprint for others to follow.
She does not believe that healing is about becoming someone new…rather she believes it’s about returning to who you were before the world taught you to disconnect from yourself. Her work is for those who feel called to live — and lead — with integrity, vitality, and purpose.
Links
Website: https://www.takebackyourhealth.ca/
Sifting Life Podcast – Spotify, Apple, Amazon: https://linktr.ee/takebackyourhealth
Facebook: /takebackyourhealthwithjen
Instagram: @takebackyourhealthwithdrjen
TikTok: @askdrjenhewson
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
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