As a result of the emails I received, Devon and I spent some time discussing what we could give all y’all to help manage fear when it creeps in. We agreed that his 6 minute and 20 second “Life Altering Relaxation” audio (that he created and released on his website last year) would be perfect, since it was met with much praise for being an extremely effective and valuable tool.

“One of the most important things in the world is your ability to relax,” said Devon. If you’re harangued by fear, anxiety, stress, bad beliefs, negative self talk, self-doubt, all of that stuff is held and run in your muscles … This audio will help take you very deep, very quickly … You’ll come back and feel incredibly relaxed and able to release fear.”

Check out the short video below in which Devon and I discuss this audio and why we think it’ll be so valuable for you. And then, follow the link below the video to go get the free audio for yourself!

CLICK HERE to get your FREE Life-Altering Relaxation Audio from Devon White.

If you are challenged with an illness, the story you perpetuate about your life and your illness is especially important because it could be a key factor in why you have become sick and why you’re not recovering. Or conversely, why you’re doing so well!

We also discuss how to make yourself immune from the negative stories others have about you and your illness that don’t serve you.

This is a long video – 25 minutes and 44 seconds – but it’s still shorter than a sitcom, it could change your life, and all this with no commercials!

We’re still working hard to get something ready for you that I think you’ll like a lot. But in the meantime stick around because we’ve got more videos coming and a really awesome free audio a la Devon that I know you’ll find very useful.

But first, watch this!

In my own healing journey, fear has definitely been my primary foe. Fortunately for me, my dear friend Devon White is a professional consultant who helps people reset to what is commonly called their “Flow” state, a position of deep health, mental clarity and top performance, and he has helped me tremendously since my diagnosis in 2007.

So, I thought he’d be the perfect person to talk with about how to dissolve fear when it comes up, which is the topic of the video interview below. This is an issue that could be discussed for days and this is just barely scratching the surface, but it’s definitely a good place to start what I consider to be a very crucial aspect of healing any illness.

Devon and I have been working closely together on creating tools that will enable simple but profound changes in the way a person engages illness. For him it’s about optimizing performance and for me it’s about healing illness and resetting into our best states.

Together we’ve come up with some special things for you, the first of which will be available soon. But right now I want to share this video with you, so here it is:

Devon and I are going to continue discussing some other core issues of healing so I can share them with you. I’m really excited about the next one, where we’ll talk about the story you tell yourself about your illness and why this is so important, and how to reframe the negative stories about your health that we are so often barraged with.

To find out more about Devon, go here: The Human Operating System.

I hope you enjoy it and please share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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Devon White

On Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of interviewing Devon White, hypnotist, consultant, and coach. Devon and I spoke about the emotional aspects of living with a chronic illness, and he addressed many of the issues, concerns, and questions sent in by listeners. It was a comprehensive, inspiring 2-hour call. Here’s an excerpt:

white_excerpt

As always, if you’d like to find out how to get the entire series as a digital download to listen to at your convenience, click here. To learn  more about Devon and the work he does go here.

Next week will be the last installment of the MS Voices Interview Series. We’ll be closing it out with Ashton Embry on Wednesday at 9 PM EST. See you on the call!

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Photo by Ashley Rose, Flickr.com

My friend Devon White had Strep throat this past weekend. He was very sick, and wrote a post on his blog about his experience:

“The silver lining of illness is the forced shutdown of all non-essential functions. Chronically tensed muscles relax, useless thoughts turn off, conversation lacks any appeal. What remains is the simple presence of me, being. Like this, still and aware, I know exactly what needs doing and I do it, one thing at a time, only what’s necessary. Sleep. Pee. Gargle with salt water. Sleep.

“Straying from germ theory I have strong evidence that much sickness is the result of personal imbalance. So when illness strikes, I take it as the body resetting itself – getting back in balance. I take these occasional resets as opportunities to find out what really matters, not just while I am sick, but in my everyday life. They are vacations from action. Forced dormancy in which my only job is to be, to access what is most essential in my life. In the unwavering primal awareness of this state I know what things need more attention and what things need to be cut out of my life entirely. As sickness fades and my abilities come online, I turn my new awareness into action creating deep congruency throughout my life – cutting what no longer suits and putting extra attention on what does.”

When I read this I thought it was a beautiful piece of writing and a poignant message. This feeling Devon talks about – the “just being” – is to me the unexpected magic of having a fever. It forces you to operate from a place where you just are…in the moment. With MS, strange and disturbing symptoms and loss of functions often create the opposite sort of being – rather than being in the moment, we often end up in the future, in the next ten minutes, or the next day, or ten years from now, worrying what our abilities will be and how we’ll make it through a simple trip to the grocery store or successfully raising our children. Or we attend to the abilities we once had in the past, how carefree and healthy we once felt.

If I could be so bold to say, I think all of us with MS would benefit from the occasional fever – a few extra degrees to singe our constant anxiety about the future, or fixation on the past, and instead be here, now, and ask ourselves questions like: What’s essential? What’s causing imbalance and needs to be cut? How does it feel to be in the simple presence of me, being?

How can you take the lessons learned from this way of being and put them into action so that your life is more deeply a fit for you and what you want?

Want more inspiration? Read Steve Jobs on How to Live Before You Die or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

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One of the core issues that has come up for me again and again on my own healing journey is the downward spiral that I’ve fallen into when I’ve been symptomatic. I’ll notice a new sensation in my body, or an old one I was never a fan of, and I’ll begin to ask myself what it means and why it’s happening…questions that can easily go down a road of negative thinking and old, not useful thought patterns about my illness. In times like these, I wished I had a CD of someone leading me into a generative state instead – where I was relaxed, calm, and confident about my body’s ability to heal. Since Devon has trained with some of the best hypnotists in the world, he happens to be an expert at that sort of thing, and this was the major inspiration for this product. The health trance we’ve created will reroute your negative thought patterns and lead you to a state that supports your system being in optimal health. I can’t wait until it’s complete so I can use it myself.

The progressive relaxation and white light meditation are essential for stress reduction, and as you may already know, stress is a major factor in flare-ups and relapses of any chronic illness. But more than that, this product will help you to redefine what health means to you. One of the ways it will do that is to charge your system up with GOOD feelings. Why? Because if you’ve got a chronic illness, you’re likely really good and really familiar with feeling bad. What we want to do is give you an equally powerful, equally familiar, equally intense experience of your body when it feels GOOD, which is the domain of white light meditation. Have you ever done this? It feels AMAZING.

I’ll be updating you on the progress of the product, but I just wanted to let you know it’s in the works and will be available soon. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like to hear or what you need, please let me know!

I am thrilled that the first piece of content I’ve posted to this site is by Devon White, founder of Phoenix and the Human Operating System, which is the most cutting-edge behavioral software program every to be released in the public sphere. Devon makes his living teaching people how to be at their best. He is incredible at what he does, though I’m not exactly objective, since he has been my partner for the last three years, both personal and professional. I was blessed to have Devon in my life when I was diagnosed with MS, and in hindsight, I am so grateful I wasn’t diagnosed before I met him, because I know I wouldn’t have had the emotional tools to handle it. Devon always calls himself a one-trick pony. With all the various people in various fields and contexts where he works, he’s always just doing one thing – leading people back to how they are when everything is ok. He helps people come home to themselves, and for me, in context of my diagnosis, that meant he was stubbornly, infuriatingly forcing my attention on KNOWING that I was going to heal. He believed it strong enough for both of us on many nights when I would wake at three a.m. gripped by fear and anxiety, wondering what the future held for me. His attention never wavered from this truth that he held for me, and he would reframe every obstacle and challenge that came up for me as part of the path to my healing. As intense as it was to have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, it was a magical and transformative time as well. Devon was teaching me what it meant to commit to an outcome, and be unwavering in its pursuit, which is an essential ingredient if you want to heal. I don’t want to ever imagine how dark a time it would have been for me had Devon not been there to hold my hand through it.

With that said, I am absolutely thrilled to kick off the site with a seven-minute audio of Devon talking about how your illness is in fact your call to adventure. I believe it does an excellent job of setting the tone for this site, and I can’t wait to share it with you. Check it out here.