There are five types of mind-body medicine that I recommend you include in your healing plan to help your body protect you from high-risk HPV virus and prevent cancer caused by high-risk HPV strains.

I’m Dr. Doni Wilson, a naturopathic doctor, clinical nutritionist, and midwife. I’ve been practicing for over 25 years, specializing in women’s health and helping women address abnormal pap smears, including high-risk HPV. I help them heal their cervix, get HPV to negative, and keep it negative—which is unheard of in standard care. 

This wasn’t even taught when I went to naturopathic medical school at Bastyr University for my doctorate and residency. We weren’t discussing the ability to prevent the virus from recurring.

Yet in my naturopathic training, my complete focus is addressing root causes of illness. Think about gardening: when you have weeds, if you just take off the dandelion flower, it will regrow. The weed returns because we only did a temporary fix. That’s often what happens in healthcare—we go for the quick fix.

When dealing with high-risk HPV, removing abnormal cells is important. If your pap smear shows CIN 2 or CIN 3 or carcinoma in situ, we need to remove those cells to prevent spread. However, we shouldn’t stop there. 

In standard care, well-trained surgeons can remove abnormal cells, but that doesn’t remove the virus, which is why many people are told HPV won’t go away.

Yet research clearly shows the human immune system can clear HPV, even though it’s a DNA virus with 14 high-risk types associated with cancer. The immune system can clear HPV, and I focus on this information. Why isn’t your immune system clearing HPV? Why is it still there? Why is it causing abnormal cells when 90% of people clear the virus without developing abnormal cells? We need to determine what in your system is depleted, imbalanced, or disrupted.

And then support your body to heal and clear the virus using natural approaches, including mind-body medicine. 

Understanding Root Causes of HPV

I talk about 8 susceptibilities or underlying root causes, including stress and trauma’s impact on your stress response system—cortisol and adrenaline. We can address imbalances in the stress hormones with nutrients and herbs to re-optimize the levels, thus eliminating the effects of stress.

We must examine nutrient deficiencies, leaky gut, and inflammatory food responses. We need to look at both the gut and vaginal microbiome. We need to check all hormones: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid, and insulin. Are there imbalances influencing your ability to fend off HPV?

Blood sugar imbalances can increase HPV risk. Toxin exposure—mold or environmental toxins—can lower our immune system, making it harder to protect against infections including HPV. Genetic variations like MTHFR and methylation issues can make us susceptible. Women exposed to emotional, sexual, or physical abuse in childhood or adulthood are more susceptible, so addressing trauma is essential.

All these factors affect your ability to clear HPV and prevent cancer, and all can be addressed through natural approaches. That’s the beauty of natural medicine—we can use substances from nature that help you heal without causing damage, side effects, dependency, or withdrawal symptoms.

If you have nutrient deficiencies, why wouldn’t we provide those nutrients? If you have disrupted microbiome or imbalanced hormones, why wouldn’t we address those? It helps your whole health, not just the vaginal area.

HPV as a Messenger

We need to look at what’s underlying in your system that you may have overlooked. Usually, we’ve been getting signals from our body all along but didn’t realize. HPV is the messenger saying, “I’m here because something needs attention.” Having HPV can be your moment to pivot and ask, “What’s going on? Why is this virus here? What can I do?”

I encourage you to consider the underlying causes and get more information about your body through testing—for example, blood work for nutrient deficiencies and urine testing for hormone imbalances. There’s so much testing you can do to figure out what the underlying cause is for your body. 

Then work with an expert like me to help you address whatever we discover so that you can heal your body, clear HPV, and prevent it from coming back again.

Once you’ve addressed root causes, your body can protect you from HPV, even with re-exposure. The human body can clear HPV—it’s well established in research, and I’ve seen it for 25 years—women clearing the virus, healing their cervix, and preventing recurrence, even when re-exposed.

The Mind-Body Connection

One natural approach to clearing HPV is the mind-body connection. I didn’t always know this was essential. However, through case after case of working with women and researching what works best, I’ve found several effective approaches:

• Diet changes to eliminate inflammatory foods
• Nutrients to address deficiencies and support immunity
• Probiotics for gut and vaginal microbiomes
• Homeopathy to remind your immune system to protect against HPV

There are so many natural substances we can use, and there are lifestyle agents. We can make sure that you’re getting enough sleep, exercise, and what I call in my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health recovery activities—those that stimulate the anti-stress part of your nervous system.

We don’t have a stress deficiency—we have an overabundance! It’s unrealistic to aim for zero stress. We must accept that stress is part of being human. What we’re deficient in is anti-stress, which is needed to counterbalance stress. We need balance, ideally more anti-stress than stress.

Ask yourself: Where am I getting anti-stress signals, and how can I get more? This leads to mind-body connection and five strategies to build anti-stress and fend off HPV.

Understanding Mind-Body Medicine

What do I mean by mind-body? Mind-body emphasizes that our mind is not separate from our body. In fact, when I write about it in my book, I state from the beginning: I consider your mind and body completely connected and completely interactive with each other. They’re not separate—they’re the same.

We tend to think we have our mind, and then we wonder what our body is doing. We even feel angry at our body or feel that our body has betrayed us by allowing HPV to show up. Women oftentimes describe feeling separate from their body, angry at their body, and wishing they could get out of their body. That is this separation of mind and body that really is an illusion we have created in our minds.

If we can stand back and realize our mind and body are communicating with each other constantly, and it’s not just a top-down mechanism. We’re very familiar with our mind, and we can use our mind to oftentimes try to control our body. We try to control our appetite or control different aspects of our body, our digestion for example. Yet we also can be quite aware that something going on in our body can affect our mind. If your heart’s racing, then you can feel anxious. 

There’s a connection, and oftentimes it becomes a vicious cycle—stress causes stomach upset, which signals back to the brain, continuously feeding each other. 

Science confirms mind-body connection, showing we can use mindfulness techniques to send anti-stress signals. Putting attention on our body through somatic therapy allows our body to communicate with us. Even just by putting your hand on your heart, you can signal oxytocin, which signals calmness to your nervous system.

There’s a very well-known connection between our mind and body. It’s just that we often didn’t learn how to intentionally use this system. That’s where I want to give you these five tools today.

Making Time for Self-Care

For many women, the issue is racing through the day caring for everyone else. We wake up, and we’re rushing to get our kids to school, to get to work, to take care of all the tasks on our to-do list, to take care of our spouse, our partner, our parents, our pets—everything. Yet we don’t have time for ourselves.

Women tell me, “Oh my gosh, I barely have time to even take a shower or get something to eat.” We’re programmed and rewarded for being busy—for workaholism—instead of self-care. We’re taught self-care is selfish.

I’m telling you: Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish—it’s essential. Learning to prioritize yourself will take practice. It’s gonna mean we need to pull out your calendar and put yourself in for appointments with yourself. I find sometimes it helps to sprinkle it in in five-minute increments. 

If you can do these 5 forms of mind-body that I’m going to be showing you, you could do it for 5 minutes multiple times a day. So it doesn’t have to take up the whole day or throw off your routine.

When women implement 5 minutes of mind-body techniques twice or three times a day, you actually increase your productivity, increase your ability to complete your other tasks in a calm way, feeling good, and getting through the day in a healthier way. Because it’s not about eliminating stress—it’s about helping you to be resilient under stress. 

How can you take care of yourself even though you’re under stress? That’s what we’re missing.

Yes, we can use nutrients and learn all kinds of different things about diet. We can use all different supplements to help us to stay healthy under stress. I would argue that we also need to be doing these five mind-body techniques or activities to help to build up our anti-stress, counteract this stress, and help your body heal.

Five Mind-Body Techniques to Help Clear HPV

1. Breath Work

The first technique is breath work. Obviously, we’re all breathing all the time. We have our autonomic nervous system breathing for us. We don’t have to think about it. Yet when you put your attention on your breath, most of us figure out that we’re breathing pretty shallow, with kind of short breathing.

When we intentionally take a deep breath, this signals to the vagus nerve—the longest nerve in the body that signals to the anti-stress nervous system—we signal calmness to the system. So if you just right now close your eyes, if you’d like, take a nice deep breath as you feel comfortable with, and at least bring your attention to your breath for a minute or two.

Just notice: What does it feel like to inhale? What does it feel like to exhale? What does that feel like in your body? What does it feel like to take a little bit deeper breath? Taking these breaths signals to your vagus nerve, activates your parasympathetic or anti-stress part of your nervous system, connecting your mind and your body. When we’re in a state of calm, our immune system works better, our digestion works better, our hormones work better, our nervous system works better. We want more of this calmness.

2. Mindfulness Practices

The breathing practice I just showed you is the beginning of mindfulness practices. There are several you can choose from. The first is the beginning steps of biofeedback. Biofeedback uses breath, bringing your attention to your breath, then putting your hand on your heart, connecting with your heart, connecting with yourself, signaling oxytocin. Now you have oxytocin, which is the anti-stress hormone, working for you, and you can connect with a sense of love and gratitude.

This is the beginning of teaching you biofeedback, which you can learn and practice in a minute. You can then go on to practice guided imagery and other forms of mindfulness as well as meditation. A lot of people think that meditation is simply sitting with your legs crossed with your eyes closed and not doing anything. People give up because their minds race.

So what I encourage you to do is start with small steps. Start with simply breath and bringing your attention to your breath, bringing your attention to your heart, bringing your attention to the moment. Every time you have a thought, notice the thought and say, “I’ll come back to you, thought.” It’s not wrong to have thoughts because we have a human brain. It’s always going to have thoughts. Just notice all of that and come back to the moment, come back to your breath.

That’s the practice of mindfulness—a practice of noticing the thoughts and bringing your attention back to the present moment. You’re teaching your mind and your nervous system that you want to be the one deciding what you’re paying attention to. From there, you can easily go into meditation, even a moving meditation. 

You can meditate while walking, while dancing. Meditation is simply the practice of being in the moment and allowing your brain waves to go to more calm brain wave states. In those calm brain wave states, we can do so much healing.

3. Time in Nature

Mind-body technique #3 is spending time in nature. Simply even if you go outside for 5 minutes, you could walk your dog, you can just listen to the birds, watch the birds. Even if it’s too cold to go outside or not safe for you to go outside, you can even just look out the window because you’re looking at nature out your window. 

Simply using our eyes to perceive nature, even if it’s looking at the plants in your home, even if it’s on a screen—you’re looking on your computer or on your phone at scenes of nature.

The human brain responds to nature. It responds to the colors in nature, the symmetry in nature, the shapes in nature. The human nervous system has a built-in response to nature. So why not give your body and your brain the signals from nature intentionally? 

There’s no cost, there’s no side effect. There might be a desire for more, but that’s a good thing because that desire for more nature exposure is only going to help you heal and is only going to help your system reset.

4. Music

Number 4 is music. Now there are many different kinds of music, and we all respond to different types of music. Some of it is based on what you’re familiar with culturally or what you enjoy. There’s also specific healing music that has specific tones and patterns and different kinds of instruments and different songs that have been shown to be healing. They’ve been shown in research—healing music has been well established.

Many cultures have healing music, whether that’s flutes or drums or singing or different tones, chimes, bells. In Peruvian ceremonies, they use medicine music or icaros, healing songs usually sung by shamans. These create healing through your mind perceiving the sound and feeling its vibration.

As humans, we are energetic beings—there is energy going through every one of our cells. Our bodies function based on energetic flow through our nerves, our nervous system—it’s all energy flowing. Energy flows through our heart; that’s how our heart pumps and how our muscles move. Music and vibration of music and sound is also going to be energetic and influence energy in our bodies.

Try listening to healing music or attending a sound bath. You’ll recognize healing music by how it makes you feel—calm, open, loving, grateful, peaceful. These healing emotions activate through music.

5. Dancing

The fifth mind-body technique is dancing. Now, dancing—we usually think of as with specific choreography, and if you have dance training, that could be absolutely something that helps you. Dancing has been shown to help all humans. What I mean when I say dancing is any form of movement of your body. It allows your body to stretch, to flow, to process, because now it’s also allowing you to go from your brain, from your mind, into your body.

This can happen also with yoga—there’s a lot of research on both yoga and dance. I’m pointing out dance because I think a lot of times people are not so aware that dance can be so healing. 

There’s something called conscious dance, and there’s a specific type of conscious dance that I’ve studied called Transcendance, developed by Jennifer Jimenez. This is a form of dance that’s free form—there’s no specific choreography. It’s meant to allow you to connect with your body, to process emotion, to flow with the music, and to allow yourself to process and let go of whatever you need to let go of, and to bring in what’s going to serve you—bringing in healing and support.

Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Mind-body medicine and recovery from stress and trauma needs to be part of the HPV healing protocol because we’re talking about a virus that can cause cancer. We’re talking about thousands of people dealing with cancer caused by HPV every year—a preventable cancer!

These mind-body techniques may seem subtle but are really powerful and necessary because we are dealing with a powerful virus so, we need to do something different to get different results.

Start wherever you can—find enjoyable music, get outside, take small steps. It’s not about climbing the mountain in one day but taking one step at a time. Before long, you’ll get your negative HPV test result, and you’ll feel confident in your body’s protective abilities.

I hope this inspires you to take your health in your own hands and begin your journey to healing. Even if you’re thinking, “I don’t know how I’m going to make time for this”—believe me, I felt that way. I had to sit down with my calendar and make the time. 

It’s not about perfection or being hard on yourself. It’s about being gentle with yourself, acceptance of your body, acceptance of your thoughts, acceptance of your emotions. It’s through that being present with ourselves that we develop self-love, self-acceptance that’s extremely healing and necessary when dealing with HPV and cancer risk.

I welcome you to join me for more information about what you can do to increase your chances of clearing HPV and preventing HPV-related cancer, as well as improving your overall health. 

I offer online group programs specifically to address high-risk HPV, and I work with patients one-on-one as well. I help women from around the world because I see that this is an issue women are facing everywhere, and I consider HPV and cervical cancer to be preventable.

You can start learning more about my approach and initial steps you can take by watching the Secret to Clear HPV Masterclass – it’s 90-minutes long and available right away. 

Sign Up Now (Free!)

From there, you might choose to join the Heal HPV Kickstart Program, for the initial steps of my protocol, including diet changes and supplements, over the next 30 days. Find the top 5 supplements I recommend in the HPV Supplement Bundle here (it is not for during pregnancy).

Register Now

Order Now

Or you can begin with the comprehensive Say Goodbye to HPV Program, which is 3 months and supports you to implement my full protocol and address all 8 susceptibilities to HPV with live, group support, and access to testing and vaginal suppositories.

If you’ve been struggling, feeling fearful, or even paralyzed by fear, thinking either that healing isn’t possible or looking for a magic pill, I encourage you to stand back and consider whether that’s really what’s going to help you be successful. Connect with your real intention, which is to get HPV to negative and prevent cancer. 

Visit my website at clearhpvnow.com to see testimonials – video after video and story after story of women who have healed from HPV – to help you know that it is possible for you too.

To learn more about my approach to healing from stress and trauma using my Stress Recovery Protocol which involves optimizing cortisol and adrenaline levels to heal the adrenals, as well as neurotransmitters, using nutrients, herbs and C.A.R.E.™ – my proprietary program to support clean eating, adequate sleep, stress recovery and exercise – I encourage you to read all about it in my latest book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.

For those needing one-on-one support, I offer consultations via Zoom or phone from anywhere in the world. I’ve worked with patients from Australia, Hong Kong, India, Europe, Dubai, Canada, throughout the United States, and more. My team can help coordinate supplement shipping worldwide, and we can work within your budget to find the right starting point.

Remember, there is help. You don’t have to figure it all out on your own. 

Thank you so much for joining me in this episode. If you’re not already subscribed, I welcome you to subscribe to How Humans Heal. If you would like more information, I welcome you to reach out. I’m happy to connect with you. 

My team is also happy to talk to you and help you understand how we can help you to protect yourself from high-risk HPV, prevent cancer, and help with any other health issues. Thanks again and I look forward to connecting with you very soon.

We’re here to help you!

Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of any disease.