Photo by macieklew

The opposite of fear is connection.

When I’m afraid, I know it’s because I’ve lost my connection in that moment to what I like to call source, or the universe, or the divine matrix. Maybe you call it spirit, or God. But whatever you call it, when you’re plugged in to that connection, there is no fear. There is only unconditional love. When you’re plugged in, you KNOW the universe has got your back. Mmm, and it feels so…amazing.

In my life, me and God have had a rocky go of it. I grew up a Jew in a Jewish community but in a family that didn’t go to temple. So from as far back as I can remember, the message I got from the world was that a connection to God didn’t matter, and even if I thought it did, it certainly was not intended for or available to me. I was an outsider with God from the start.

This has always been a source of great pain for me, and it’s taken me most of my life to finally admit to myself (like it was some shameful secret) that feeling connected to something greater than myself was something I really wanted. And it took equally long to discover how it made sense for me to express that connection.

What I’ve arrived at is that the illness I have, which happens to be called MS, is how that disconnection from source has manifested in my body. And in grokking that, I simultaneously now understand that it will only be possible to completely heal my illness by healing that state of disconnection, and by actively cultivating my relationship with God.

Of course I acknowledge that there may have been other factors involved in my getting sick, such as my poor diet, environmental toxicity, genetic factors, etc. But when I get really still – still enough to truly feel the subtlety of what MS is in my body – I recognize it as the intimate pain I’ve lived with for a very long time. The pain of disconnection.

Energy Healing: Working Upstream

In the shamanic tradition of energy medicine, healing at the level of energy is spoken of as being the furthest “upstream.” In other words, if our existence were a river, the furthest downstream would be the level of the mind, then above it the level of the physical, and above that the level of energy.

I’ve spoken a lot on this blog about what is required to address the level of the physical. Diet, supplements, decisions on whether or not to take the MS drugs, exercise, juicing. And these things are all essential components of getting well and cannot be ignored.

But here’s what’s really cool. When you heal at the level of energy, the level furthest upstream, the shifts you make cascade down and affect change in both the level of the mind and the level of the physical. When you heal at the energetic, what you are doing is recoding at the cellular level, the level of your DNA. You heal the disease imprint in your energetic body so that it no longer manifests in your physical body.

This is why treatments that just address the physical – like surgery, chemo, and other medicines are often only effective for the short term. As long as your energetic body is coding for disease, disease will manifest in your physical body, one way or another.

Energy medicine is the Rolls Royce of healing work. Deeper than diet could ever take you.

In large part what it means to work at the level of the energetic is to establish a solid rapport with God. And the first place to start is to notice when you feel fear. When you feel afraid, it’s almost always because you’re projecting an imagined reality into the future. Which means you’re not present. That’s your red flag to do whatever you need to do to reconnect to the universe. Meditate, look at the stars, do yoga, whatever it is for you.

The narrow, dogmatic loyalty to the paradigm of western medicine is on its way out. We’re waking up. People everywhere are healing their illnesses – illnesses that are supposedly incurable by conventional medicine standards – by connecting to that which is greater than themselves. In fact the highly sought-after neurologist and author Dr. Perlmutter states in his new book Power Up Your Brain (which I spoke about in an earlier post) that a connection to source is what he’s found to be the common thread in all his patients who have experienced “miracle” recoveries.

So if you don’t already have a practice that connects you to spirit and you’re not sure where to start, open the question up to the universe. Begin to make yourself available to what it means to heal in this way. Make it a priority to cultivate this connection, as important as what you eat and what pills you may take. You’ll be doing the deepest work – working upstream.

My interview with Dr. Lipton is now available for sale individually (it was previously only available as part of the MS Voices Interview Series) for $29. If you’re interested in purchasing it, you can do so here.

Want more inspiration? Read God’s Timing or go the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

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!

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

The red pillow on my carpet where it all went down.

Monday around 9:30 p.m., if you had walked into my house you would have found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, heaving, and thrusting out deep, guttural, staccato sounds of agony.

This is not what I typically do on a Monday evening.

But something serendipitous is happening. Not fun, no not fun at all. Not even a little bit. But definitely serendipitous. I have found myself in a moment of my life where I’m faced with an extremely challenging and painful emotional situation. And (finally) the universe has simultaneously presented me with the tools to address it. In fact, not just to address it but to use it and evolve through it. (“The only way out is through.”) The tools have appeared as the work of Michael Brown and his two books The Presence Process, which I spoke of a few days ago, and Alchemy of the Heart (Amazon Affiliate link), as well as his audios from his various seminars via Live365 radio on The Presence Process station, which you can access through his website The Presence Portal.

The essence of Brown’s work is this: Every time you get upset (set up) by a situation in your life, it is simply a trigger, a reflection of unintegrated emotional charges from your childhood. Every time. Without exception.

We spend our entire lives running from our deep pain and hurt. We drink, we eat, we fuck, we pray, we do this, we do that, anything to avoid really, really feeling anything. When an upsetting situation arises in our life, we attempt to fix it by changing our physical circumstance. We switch lovers, we move to a different town, we get a different job. Or we simply believe that the situation that’s upsetting us is the fault of whomever is involved, and we ask ourselves questions like “Why does this always happen to me?” But because we’re not addressing the causal point of our experience – the emotional signature from our childhood that hasn’t been processed and integrated – we just recreate the same circumstances in a “new” place.

Being With the Emotion

So Brown advises the following I’d-rather-stick-needles-under-my-fingernails exercise instead: He says to sit down and simply “be with” the emotion without condition. Do not tell yourself the story about what’s happening and why and who’s to blame. Do not try to suppress or criticize what you are feeling. Just sit your ass down and be with it. Feel the feeling. And in doing so, just as we don’t need to tell our body how to breathe, we don’t need to tell ourselves how to integrate these emotions. By allowing ourselves to have the experience, we’re finally allowing the innate wisdom of our body to do the work. We don’t have to know how. We just need to trust and know that it will integrate. And once it does, we have cleaned up the causal point of this anger, fear, and grief. (At least one of them anyway.)

Which brings us back to my grief-stricken spasms Monday night, sitting on my living room floor. Because what happened was this: Without the story to accompany this feeling, something opened up. As I sat there emoting all over myself, I felt very surely and deeply that what I was crying about did not in fact have a damn thing to do with what I thought I was crying about. I was grieving from a place much older and more expertly hidden. And when it was done, I felt a calm take over. I didn’t feel “good”, but I did feel…at rest.

Dis-ease

But what was really interesting for me was that as I sat there, still and centered in the aftermath, I understood from a place that didn’t involve thought that what I had just released healed a part of what Multiple Sclerosis is in my body. Because I know, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that my illness was born of that pent up dis-ease. I know that I have just begun – I mean truly begun – the gritty, dirty, ugly, uncomfortable work of becoming exquisitely healthy (and it doesn’t have anything to do with prescription medication). And what I love about this particular model is that Michael Brown is not a guru and he doesn’t claim to have the answers. He has simply communicated a path that works. But the work, and the answers, that’s all us.

When I asked Bruce Lipton how to change my beliefs, this is the answer I was looking for. It’s not as pretty and clean as I would have liked, but it’s powerful, and I know as I’ve ever known anything that I’m on my way, and MS is on it’s way…out.

And as for the extremely challenging emotional situation I’m dealing with right now, I’m going to trust in one of Brown’s favorite statements, which is that we don’t get what we want or need, but we do get what we require. We always get what we require.

Want more inspiration? Read Broke Down or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

Photo by Terry McComb, Flickr

I’ll be concluding the 5-part series on beliefs soon, but I wanted to take today to address a question I received via email. The question comes from (I’ll call her) Penelope, the wife of a patient of Ann Boroch (Ann healed herself of MS many years ago and now works as a naturopath, helping people with MS and other chronic illnesses heal using diet and supplements.)

The question was:

It’s unnerving to go the homeopathic route because we’re not sure what’s going on.  My husband’s been working with Ann for the past 4 months.  At the start he was really miserable and then seemed to improve.  Now I’m not sure what’s going on.  Is this common with the healing?  Will he have this off and on until he gets to the other side of healing?

I thought this question was deserving of its own post because I think many people feel “unnerved” by straying from the well-trodden path of Western Medicine. I think the saying goes something like “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t?”

We take comfort in familiarity. When we take a pill, or give ourselves a shot, or receive IV steroids (no matter how uncomfortable that may be and how many side effects we may suffer) we are still doing what we’ve been raised to do and raised to believe in – when you’re sick you take medicine and it makes you better.

However, when it comes to MS, unfortunately the treatments available are not quite so straightforward or successful. The Disease Modifying Drugs currently available simply slow progression in some people and can reduce the severity of flare-ups, but in doing so they inundate the body with chemicals, create many side-effects, and in some people, are completely ineffective.

Healing not managing

What Penelope’s husband is undertaking with the help of Ann Boroch is to fundamentally heal his system. He is on a journey of healing, which is markedly different than the path of “managing”. He has stepped outside the confines of Western medicine and entered into a paradigm in which the belief is that it’s possible to heal, to restore the natural balance and wisdom of the body without the use of drugs.

This is a brave path, because it’s the path less traveled. It’s not the path for the weak or for those who seek instant gratification. It’s not the path for those who believe the majority must be correct. It took a long time for Penelope’s husband’s body to arrive at his current disease state. And it will take some time to heal it. Setbacks are expected. MS is a complex condition.

Setbacks

I experienced many setbacks along my own healing journey, but when I look back on where I was when I began the diet and supplement regimen three years ago and where I am now, I’m so grateful for my own courage to choose that route. The results are amazing.

So for Penelope and anyone else who has chosen this path, remind yourself often that you’re on a journey of healing, not managing, and allow that to empower you and give you strength to endure the setbacks.

If you haven’t yet listened to my interview with Ann Boroch, just enter your name and email in the box with the red arrow at the top right of this page for free access to it, as well as my entire interview archive, including my conversation with Dr. Bruce Lipton.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

nasa1fan/MSFC, Flickr

You are insignificant in this universe and nothing you think or feel has the power to change the world around you.

Does that belief sound familiar? It should, since it was installed in nearly all of us as children. Why? Because for the past 300 years, science has led us to believe that our inner experience cannot affect reality. Since Newton published his laws of physics, we’ve accepted that we are just passive victims in a world where things happen for no apparent reason. Since that time, the scientific research has been grounded in the belief that our consciousness – our beliefs and thoughts and feelings – simply were not part of the equation.

In addition to science’s belief (which has become our belief) that we cannot affect the world around us, our parents taught us that there are authorities in this world – teachers, doctors, policemen – and we are not them. We don’t know and we don’t have power.

But…

The Revolution

A quiet revolution has been taking place for the past 100 years, and it’s challenging the very nature of our reality. This revolution, provoked by validated, paradigm-shattering scientific research, provides the evidence that we are, in fact, the architects of our reality.

Newton’s mechanical view of the universe sees the smallest particles of our world as just things. If the world is made up of things, of course we can’t affect those things with our beliefs. However, quantum physics looks at the universe quite differently, and we’ve recently discovered the following three very important piece of information:

1. Quantum energy can exist in two forms – waves and particles.

2. A quantum particle can be in more than one place at once and no matter how far apart they appear physically, they act as if still connected.

3. Quantum particles are not limited to past, present, and future.

Why is this relevant to you and your illness? Because if quantum particles can do miraculous things that defy the “laws” of science as we know them, and we’re made of quantum particles, then WE can do miraculous things as well.

As Gregg Braden says in his book The Spontaneous Healing of Belief [affiliate link]:

Scientists have shown that while we may think that we’re only observing our world, in fact it’s impossible for us to simply “watch” anything. Whether our attention is focused on a quantum particle during a laboratory experiment or anything else – from the healing of our bodies to the success of our careers and relationships – we have expectations and beliefs about what we’re watching. Sometimes we’re consciously aware of these preconceptions, but often we’re not. It’s these inner experiences that become part of what we’re focused on. By “watching,” we become part of what we’re watching.

In the words of Wheeler, that makes us all “participators.” The reason? When we focus our attention on a given place in a moment of time, we involve our consciousness. And in the vast field of consciousness, it appears that there’s no clear boundary that tells us where we stop and the rest of the universe begins. When we think of the world in this way, it becomes clear why the ancients believed that everything is connected. As energy, it is.

As scientists continue to explore just what it means to be participators, new evidence points to an inescapable conclusion: that we live in an interactive reality where we change the world around us by changing what happens inside of us while we’re watching – that is, our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Are you willing to accept the responsibility?

So, if our beliefs hold so much power, where do they come from and what if our beliefs are wrong? What if we’re more than we’ve been taught to believe? What if our powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of disease is simply based on a limiting belief we inherited from our family, our culture, our science, our past?

Before we go any further, then, ask yourself this: Are you willing to accept the scientifically proven relationship between reality and belief and the responsibility that comes with this power? The responsibility to heal yourself?

This was Part 1 in a 5-part series. To be continued in Part 2…

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

Photo by ScottFeldstein, Flickr

I received an important question in response to my post the other day. Pam wants to know: “If you tell yourself that you are healed, and then you continue to experience symptoms when you try to go about doing things that you want to do and you used to do, how do you keep up the positive thoughts when your body is telling you otherwise?”

Let me begin by saying that telling yourself you’re already healed and thinking positive thoughts will not get you where you want to go.

You need to be able to FEEL as if you have already healed. Working toward a result is not the same as thinking from it. When we work toward a result we’re perpetually on our way somewhere, with no definitive end in sight. On the other hand, when we enter into the image of what it is we want – total health – we are already there.

Breaking the Concrete Block

In Gregg Braden’s The Divine Matrix, he uses the metaphor of a martial artist who breaks a concrete block or a stack of boards with his bare hands. The key to succeeding in such an endeavor is to focus your attention not on the point of contact but in the place of the completed act – the healing already accomplished and the brick already broken. In Braden’s words:

Martial artists do this by centering their awareness on a point that’s beyond the bottom of the block. The only way their hand can be in this place is if they’ve already passed through the space between them and that point. The fact that the space happens to be occupied by something solid, such as a concrete block, becomes almost secondary. In this way, they’re thinking from the point of completion, rather than about the difficulty of getting to there. They’re experiencing the joy of what it feels like to accomplish the act, as opposed to all the things that must occur before they can be successful. This simple example offers a powerful analogy for precisely the way consciousness seems to work.

Cultivating the Frequency of Health

What you want to do is build and cultivate the state of wellness for yourself – what is your body like when you are healthy, vibrant, and strong? Begin to explore this – discover the frequency of health for yourself and grow it.

If you need to remember back to a time when you felt healthy, do that. Or imagine what health feels like. But make sure that you imagine with your entire body, in other words, literally embody the feeling. Feel it in your muscles, in your bones, in your gut, in your limbs. Feel how healthy your body already is, right now. This feeling of health is the singular state that you are building toward. Putting your attention on this feeling is like picking up the key to the lock that will open the door to your health.

So what happens if I’m symptomatic?

If you’re experiencing symptoms and you’re finding it difficult to maintain the frequency of health in that moment, then don’t force it. The worst thing you could do for yourself is to set up a situation in which you don’t just feel sick but you also feel like a failure!

In those moments, do something else entirely. White light meditation is an excellent way to bring yourself back to the frequency of health without fighting against the state you’re currently in. Instead of resisting your symptoms, simply sit down and imagine white light flowing through your body. This will relax you, ease any anxiety you feel, and generate a healing frequency – which is where you want to be.

Identify Your Beliefs

Finally, it’s essential to identify and explore your beliefs to ensure that they support your ability to get well. If you haven’t yet, listen to my interview with Bruce Lipton about the power of belief. I’ve been receiving lots of inquiries since the interview was published about how, exactly, beliefs can be changed. I’ll be addressing this over the next few days in a special five-part series called “Changing Your Beliefs: The Key to Self-Healing”.

The core of my private consulting work is identifying beliefs that aren’t useful for your healing and changing them so that they support your journey to health. True to my path, I’ve put profound transformation and health at the center of all that I do and I now work to help my private clients do the same – guiding them in moving their lives from a place of anxiety, fear, and hopelessness to a reality anchored in a state of potent possibility, power, inspiration and purpose.

For more information on working with me privately click here.

Want more inspiration? Read Multiple Sclerosis is Not Your Enemy or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

Photo by My_Melting_Brain, Flickr

A man in his twenties had been diagnosed with a rare heart condition which doctors believed would be fatal. Neville, the visionary and mystic and author of the book The Power of Awareness, came to visit the man on his deathbed. He asked the man to experience himself as if the healing had already taken place. “I suggested that in imagination, he see the doctor’s face expressing incredulous amazement in finding him recovered, contrary to all reason, from the late stages of an incurable disease, that he see him double-checking in his examination and hear him saying over and over, ‘It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle.’”

Of course, the man did indeed recover and go on to live a healthy and happy life.

This story is told in Gregg Braden’s book The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief. Braden explains:

The secret, the man revealed, was that rather than simply wishing for his health, since the day of their meeting, he had lived from the “assumption of already being well and healed.” And herein we find the secret of propelling our heart’s desires from the state of imagination to the reality of our everyday lives: It’s our ability to feel as if our dreams have already come to life, our wishes are fulfilled, and our prayers already answered.

Want more inspiration? Read Breaking The Concrete Block or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

When I was younger, I lived my life under the pleasant assumption that if something was available to me – to eat, to wear, to play with – then the adults who run this world must have already made sure it was healthy and safe for me. I believed that this mysterious group of adults was benevolent and all-knowing, and that they had my best interest in mind, of course.

Funny, huh?

We’re Killing Ourselves

The truth is I may still have been navigating my life with this naivete if I hadn’t developed MS and believed firmly in the power of my own body to heal and get back in balance. But something interesting happened when I decided to begin eating for the purpose of healing. I realized that there were nearly no restaurants, delis, or cafes where I could eat a truly healthy meal! And with that realization came the startling understanding that our country’s eating habits were killing us, and there seemed to be a tacit agreement between those of us consuming the food and those of us providing it to do nothing, despite mounting evidence of the dangers.

At the same time, I began educating myself about what a healthy diet really means by exposing myself to naturopaths, nutritionists, and books and articles about what foods help us thrive and heal and live long, vibrant lives. Part of this education involved understanding the incentives that keep our poor dietary habits in place despite the knowledge of a far better way, among them greed, gluttony, and ignorance.

Everyone’s Doing It

Have you seen the recent commercials and print ads for Dunkin’ Donuts? They’ve adapted the slogan “America Runs on Dunkin’”. It’s a brilliant campaign. In four words they are telling you that the whole country’s doing it and you should too, and a donut and a cup of coffee will provide all the energy you need to get through your day. They’re not just approving of this diet, they’re highly encouraging it, and they’re using the social proof of all of America to convince you of its merits. When I see these commercials, it almost makes me want to run on Dunkin’! And I know I won’t be running – or walking – anywhere if I switch to the Dunkin’ diet!

I could turn this into a really long post, citing all the evidence and causal links between our diets and our diseases, but you can find that information easily online yourself. What I want to bring your attention to is how easy and dangerous it is to buy into the logic that because these foods are everywhere, they must be okay. Because they are not okay.

If you have MS, you’re lucky, because you’ll likely experience acute symptoms in your body within a day or two if you eat the standard American diet versus a healthy diet designed for self-healing and longevity. I can tell you that after three years on a healthy diet, whenever I deviate I feel it. But if you don’t have a chronic illness, you’re damaging yourself just as much, but maybe the cause and effect isn’t quite so fast and obvious. Diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer’s. The chances of developing these conditions are all multiplied significantly by eating a poor diet. By eating the American diet.

When Dunkin’ Donuts tells me that America runs on Dunkin’ I believe them. Oh I know it. And that’s the problem. America runs on Dunkin’ but should you?

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

Photo by Mediageek, Flickr

My sister Sharon and her husband Milan bought a fixer-upper in New Jersey last summer. I’m not talking about a house in need of paint and new carpets. Have you seen the ’80s movie The Money Pit with Tom Hanks? It’s more along those lines. They’ve been living in two rooms of their house for months now while Milan skillfully and passionately renovates it himself.

His plan was to start with the kids’ bedrooms upstairs, so that they had their space as soon as possible. The first step was to fix the crooked floors. But when he began to do that, he realized the supporting beams for the entire top floor of the house were rotting. In an effort to replace those, he found that the frame of the house was actually sinking on one side. In order to address that, he needed to go all the way down to the basement, where the foundation needed serious work.

Yesterday I visited them and he took me for a tour of the work he’s done and shared some history of the house. Turns out that just a year ago it had been occupied by two families in separate parts of the house and an illegal taxi service on the ground floor. I was confused. I asked how it could be that it had been occupied just a year ago but yet the fundamental structure of the house was in such dire condition. He said it was because all the previous owners sensed that the problems would require a complete foundational overhaul, and they were probably scared and unwilling to face it. So instead they just covered the symptoms with flimsy band-aids so they could continue to inhabit the house, never addressing the root of the problems.

Welcome to Western Medicine.

All of the current drugs available for Multiple Sclerosis are band-aids. And 99.9 % of people with MS want their upstairs renovated without ever peeking into their basement. It takes someone bold and courageous to walk the three flights down to the foundation and take an unflinching look at what’s there.

Have you?

Want more inspiration? Read The Importance of Story or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.

If you want to achieve a certain outcome, in this case healing, put your attention on those who’ve gotten the results you want. Find out what they did that worked. Let them inspire you to believe it’s possible. Set your world up so that you are constantly exposed to people who are healing themselves, and limit your exposure to those who’d rather just commiserate about their pain. The beliefs of the people you rub up against will influence you, so rub up against those who believe healing is possible and who’ve taken action to get well.

Then take action.

Want more inspiration? Read The Silver Lining of Illness or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

Get The Self-Healing Coach delivered…FREE! Sign up for free Self-Healing Coach updates via RSS or email.