Ivory Shields is an occupational therapist and holistic lifestyle coach, spiritual mindset coach, actress and speaker. Shields is an advocate for women and holistic reproductive health and childhood trauma healing. She specializes in teaching women about reproductive and hormone health and how to have a better quality of life through the use of botanical and natural therapies, movement therapy, nutrition therapy and meditation therapy.
What does a holistic therapist do?
I’ll start by saying most people have heard of physical therapy but not a lot of people have heard of occupational therapy. Occupational therapists have the luxury and the gift of being able to assess our clients for the rehabilitation process from a holistic standpoint. We get to look at many different areas of their life. That includes not only just the physical and anatomical pieces that may be broken or impaired, but we also get to look at their lifestyle.
We get to look at their environment, we get to look at their family dynamics, we get to look at their daily routines and what they do and what they eat on a daily basis, and what their schedule looks like. We get to look at and assess all of those different factors and those different dynamics and use that in our treatment approach to help that patient rehab back to their prior level of function, or we modify a task or their environment so that they’re still able to be successful in whatever it is that they want to do.
What are the benefits of holistic therapy?
I am not an advocate of pharmaceuticals. The less that we can rely on pharmaceuticals I think the better off we’ll be. I don’t encourage anyone to stop their medications, and I think that medication and pharmaceuticals has its place. I do think that in addition to that, we’ll see the biggest impact when we begin to incorporate a more natural approach to healing our minds and bodies. A lot of it is really the food that we eat, and using food as medicine, versus using chemicals as medicine, using plants as healing modalities and botanicals as healing modalities like CBD.
Using supplements, making sure our bodies have the right minerals and the right levels because all of that contributes to our brain health, which then contributes to our mental health. Think about the environmental modifications and adjustments that we can make in our lives, like our schedules. If you’re someone who has insomnia, instead of taking a sleeping pill, why not try taking your phone out of your room for about an hour or two before you’re getting ready to go to bed? It requires a little bit more planning, intention, and effort. I think the more that we can make those little small lifestyle changes over time, we’ll be better in the long run.
