Keesha Ewers answers the question:

What is the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you?

One year I went through what I called Blacktober. It was a time period when my washing machine broke, my dryer caught on fire, my car broke down. It seemed like every electrical appliance in my house was breaking down. I was just shouldering it all and not really telling anybody, just dealing with it. My husband was away out of town for a month in Australia, and so I had four kids at home and all this was happening. I could feel myself slowly starting to feel more and more, I think you would call it less and less resilient and my bandwidth shrinking on this.

My running partner showed up one morning after... I must have given some indication on the telephone that my washing machine had died. And she showed up with all these garbage bags. I said, “Oh, you should not come into my house. This is not a good time.” She is a dear friend of mine and she just shouldered on past me and went into my laundry room where all of this wet laundry from the washing machine and dryer was just blah. It was just such a mess. And she started putting it in these garbage sacks, and pretty wordlessly, just doing it. And then took those garbage sacks, put them in her car. And the whole time I'm protesting, “Jan, Jan, you don't need to be doing this. They're coming in a couple of days.”

She laundered all of our clothes, brought it back, all folded. And then she said, “Every single time that you don't ask for help, it deprives somebody of being able to make a difference in your life.” It was the most remarkable lesson for me. It just went in and created new tissue in my heart where it just opened up. The idea that I just had to do everything by myself, that comes from past trauma of soldiering on. It was that moment that it broke open like an egg. It was so beautiful and then I was able to ask for help on some of the other things and my community rallied around me and it all got done.

I just remember thinking, Why didn't I do this in the first place? So that's the nicest thing, big, big moment in my life.

Dr. Keesha Ewers is an integrative medicine expert, Doctor of Sexology, Family Practice ARNP, psychotherapist, and herbalist, is board-certified in functional medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, and is the founder and medical director of the Academy for Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program.

Dr. Keesha has been in the medical field for over 30 years. After conducting the HURT Study in 2013 (Healing Un-Resolved Trauma), she developed the HURT Model for understanding how past childhood trauma impacts adult health. This led to the creation of the You Unbroken online program for patients to heal their own trauma, and the Mystic Medicine deep immersion healing retreats she leads at her home on San Juan Island, Washington.

Dr. Keesha is a popular speaker, including at Harvard and from the TEDx stage, and the author of Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle: The Woman’s Guide to Reclaiming Emotional Freedom and Vibrant Health and The Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook: Anti-Inflammatory Recipes With 7 Ingredients or Less for Busy People.