How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can
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There are endless studies that cite stress as the dominating factor in many psychological conditions and physical diseases. However, stress itself isn’t even so much the problem. It is how we react to those stressful influences that causes the internal stress, which closes us off to our well-being. In other words, the problem is our relationship with stress.
The Question of “Why Me?”
When I first discovered all of this information you are now learning, I blamed myself. I questioned how some people, who had survived unspeakable traumas like war, could live happily and healthily into their nineties. And how someone like myself, who grew up with copious amounts of love and nothing I’d consider as traumatic as something like war, could end up where I was. Eventually, I realized that these struggles of mine were in no way due to flaws or failures of those who raised me, or something inherently wrong with me, either. They just were . Perhaps I was just born a sensitive soul. Perhaps this was simply meant to be my journey for a time. Without knowing the intricacies or answers, I let it all be okay. It was just time to move onward.
Now, I often get “why me?” from clients. Why can’t I handle things when I know others who have been through worse? Why can’t I get over it already? What’s wrong with me? I want to explain this a bit further because it’s so important.
First, there are emotional forces—beliefs, past experiences, perceptions, discomfort with who we are, and more—in each of us. These beliefs react with our energy system and this determines how we react to outside influences. Most of us have tried to change our external lives, but alas, we remain imbalanced, unhappy, or unhealthy. And while it’s essential to listen to your heart in terms of leaving toxic relationships and making other changes that are good for your soul, it can be a faulty plan to rely on that completely. When you look at the effort and energy it takes to constantly try to control or adapt to situations around you—whether it be chasing viruses or trying to change stressful circumstances in life—you will find that this, in and of itself, is stressful. And you will learn that it is far easier to make any necessary changes that your soul desires when you feel better about yourself.
Second, there are two types of energies with which you may have come to this world. These are past-life energies and generational energies. Let me briefly explain.
Past-Life Energies
The concept of past lives is built on the idea or belief that before you came here, to this earth, you lived many lives before. You had experiences, connections, and relationships that you still carry with you from those past lives that may be negatively affecting your experience here in this life. For example, perhaps in a past life you were a mother who lost her child in a car accident. It is possible that in this lifetime you will still hold some of the fears or memories in your energy field, which are impeding your experience now. This was not something I explored during my healing process, but it is something I have seen to be beneficial for clients to work on. While there are many professionals who specialize in past-life regression (a process of leading you back into that past life in order to heal it), I will teach you how I clear energies that come from past-life experiences.
Generational Energies
Generational energies are energies you inherited from your ancestors. You might have heard various names for these energies, including inherited energies or ancestral energies . In the same way we can inherit genes or personality traits from our parents and ancestors, we sometimes inherit their energies, too. These energies can be in the form of unresolved emotion from experiences from their lives, beliefs, or fears. Many people who are carrying around heavy generational energies may feel like they’ve always had a cloud over their head. They may have a difficult time determining when it started or where it’s from. They may describe it as not feeling like their own—and this is accurate because their body doesn’t sense a point of origin for it. I see this often in families with heavy energy lineages, like Holocaust survivors. If you suspect this is relevant to you (and even if you don’t), it’s wise to explore it.
When you work with generational energies, it’s important to know that everyone has them. There is no reason to be angry with your parents or ancestors. We can pass along lots of stuff to our kids and no one is immune. It’s part of life to work this stuff out. While these energies may not be “ours,” they are our responsibility to clear for ourselves. I believe that these energies keep getting passed down until they perhaps reach a person who is evolved and conscious enough to be capable of clearing them. This is a great opportunity for you to turn around a long-held familial pattern.
While past-life and generational energies can be important, it’s essential that we don’t get into a place of focusing primarily on them. I have never seen these energies be more important in the healing process than one’s own experiences, beliefs, and other patterns. They are certainly worth exploring, but do not allow yourself to use them as a distraction from your own “stuff.”
Perhaps it’s your own life experience that has brought you to this place, or perhaps you have some of the “born with” energies and they are affecting you. It’s likely a mix of both. If you are not healing or finding happiness like you thought you would, or like you thought you should, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. In fact, it means you are exceptional. You are breaking through, breaking free, breaking open in ways that could happen only by having your patience and persistence challenged. Vitamin B or detoxing or the strongest treatment on earth could not do for you what this process is doing for you.
But the real answer to the “why me?” question is that the answer doesn’t matter. You are where you are for some reason that you might not fully understand. But this I’m sure of: the universe, and your body, will not let you do what you’ve been doing any longer—living small or whatever else you’ve been up to. This is both the human burden and the gift. This is meant to be your path. Not forever, though. You get to move on from here.
Change Your Relationship with Stress
The body has the incredible ability both to protect and defend itself (via the fight, flight, or freeze response) and to heal and repair itself. The only catch is that these processes cannot happen simultaneously. The body can only settle into full healing mode once we take it out of its crisis mode, or sustained stress state. This does not in any way mean that you have to be stress-free to heal. It simply means that it is your work to do what you can to make your body feel safe enough to do so.
The best way to get the body to relax enough to heal is by turning off the fight, flight, or freeze pattern. In other words, we need to convince the triple warmer meridian that it’s safe to come out of intense papa bear mode. A proven method of doing this is by turning on the relaxation response , a term coined by Dr. Herbert Benson, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 2 The relaxation response is a physical state of relaxation that can be a chieved by participating in activities such as yoga, energy healing, acupuncture, prayer, meditation, qi gong, and many other modalities—all of which create the opposite effect of the fight, flight, or freeze response. In fact, the relaxation response is so powerful that you can see its potential in the common phenomenon where people who have food allergies will often see a dramatic decrease or disappearance in reactions while they are on vacation. This is because their body is not being triggered into a stress response in the same way it usually is at home. Perhaps they feel less fearful to be themselves in a place where nobody knows them, or their boss is not triggering the “I’m not good enough” feeling that causes stress, and more.
My own process, which you’ll be practicing throughout this entire book, is effective because we are always working directly with releasing that root emotional imbalance and its relationship to stress in the energy system. Utilizing an approach called energy psychology , which is the basis of this book, does this. Energy psychology simply refers to techniques that specifically address the relationship between our energy system and our emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Access
ing and working with our energy system in this way gives us the opportunity to change our relationship to stress, which helps us become the most integrated, joyful version of ourselves.
Energy work gives us a tool to talk our triple warmer meridian (aka the papa bear meridian) off the ledge and onto more stable ground. It is only then that the body can move from a place of defense and protection to the place of instigating its powerful self-healing ability.
In order to heal fully and completely, we need to change our physiological response to stress. When you do this, you will not be a prisoner of worry, fearing that stress can take you down. I remember doctors telling me, even as I healed, that I would always be at high risk for relapse if I got stressed. If I caught a cold or the flu, did too much, or ate sugar, I would end up sick again, they’d say. This is a very common experience for many, and I was informed of it in only well-meaning ways; however, this became not only a personal belief of mine but also a stress in and of itself because I ended up feeling out of control and helpless. I can’t handle stress. I’ll get sick again if I catch a cold. Relapse is inevitable.
It tortured me, but it didn’t have to, because I eventually learned that once you do the inner work and strengthen your being at a core level, which includes changing your relationship with stress, you are no longer the fragile person you might have been before. It’s essential to update your mental records about this. You can take a little roughing around. You can get well, and stay well, even when you have too much to do, eat some sugar, or catch a cold.
To be completely empowered (and successful!), it is far more intelligent to shift our relationships and reactions to external influences, so we can remain stable even on shaky ground.
The Benefit of Self-Healing
Don’t fear if you are sitting frozen wondering how you will ever get from where you are now to a place where you can express and live from your true self while feeling calm and balanced.
It’s likely to happen in comfortable baby steps instead of giant leaps. As you’ll be learning more about shortly, feeling out of control is one of the biggest triggers for us feeling unsafe in this world. Self-healing immediately works on counteracting that deep-seated feeling with every application you practice. In essence, it reverses helplessness. By embracing self-healing, you will learn to feel safe in your own hands, affirming the message of “I can be okay,” no matter what, and “I can help myself !” In other words, the sheer act of taking your healing into your own hands sends a strong message to the body of safety and capability, actually reversing the fight, flight, or freeze response. The practice of self-healing acts as its own healing modality. You will soon come to see that you are the key to a process of which you felt so wildly out of control.
The only requirement for success is that we need to do our own work. Even while using the support of medicine or other alternatives, we cannot excuse ourselves from the biggest part of the process. People often feel pressure to choose one way or another—Western medicine or natural healing. But the truth is that there is no right or wrong path. We just have to meet our chosen medicine halfway. Even for those who prefer to use natural healing, medical intervention does not have to feel like failure in any way. Treatment often gives us time to heal the real wounds. Any healing approach can be beneficial for us when we find a way to feel good about it. The bottom line is that we need to become an environment where healing happens. We need to clean up our soil. And the best way I know to do that is by addressing your whole self—mind (mental patterns), body (physical self, including energetic patterns in the body), and spirit (the energy of who you really are at the core).
An Introduction to My Three-Part Approach to Healing
You may remember the tree analogy from earlier. Deep and permanent healing comes from cleaning up the soil of your life so that you can be who you really are. Everything that will help you heal ultimately comes down to that one focus, and that’s what my work is based on. Here, I’m going to briefly outline my approach to healing that we’ll be going through together in Section II .
Part One: Surrender, Accept, and Flow
Before you can even begin to heal, you have to surrender to where you are as your starting point. You have to be able to look at yourself as that tree with some brittle leaves and soil that could use love, and become okay with where you currently are. Being right where you are and being at peace with that is a required part of the healing process. Actually, it’s a required part of life. I know it sucks and you’re trying desperately to get to a better place, but learning to accept exactly where you are now in all of your ungraceful glory is super-duper important. Learning to forgive yourself, laugh at yourself, and stop beating yourself up about every little thing is, ironically, part of why you’re here. You must learn to be easier on yourself. You must stop wasting your energy fighting so darn hard. Fixing things might be your goal, but learning to feel better about the things you want to fix is an essential part of your journey.
Learning the art of surrender is essential, because in that space, there is great opportunity to create a foundation for your healing. This includes starting to work with energy and thought patterns. Through this, you can practice being gentle with yourself. You will need this skill, because a being who is berated will not easily heal. You know how it feels when other people have done this to you? All the years of trying to unravel the messages you got from parents, teachers, and others? “You should do more.” “You should be more.” “Hurry up and succeed.” Well, you need to start doing the opposite of that. You need to learn to be lighter on yourself. It’s a requirement for well-being. Instead, say things like, “It’s okay, I have time.” “I can relax.” “I’m doing just fine.” I promise, it will make a magical difference in your life.
Part Two: Identify Blockages
There are several things that block our healing process. In order to heal, each and every part of our being must be aligned with being well. While this seems obvious, the majority of my clients have some big resistance to being well. In other words, often at a subconscious level that they’re not aware of, they aren’t in full alignment with their own healing. Being in alignment means wanting to heal, feeling deserving of healing, knowing you are able to heal, being ready to heal, and more. If at any level, either consciously or unconsciously, part of you is resistant to overcoming your challenge, it’s going to be like climbing Mount Rainier against the wind. Maybe it already has been this difficult, and now you know why.
Let me show you this concept in action. Let’s say you started experiencing panic attacks right before the school spelling bee in eighth grade, an event at which you were convinced you’d fail. And because of that panic attack, your teacher let you sit out and just watch your classmates instead of participating. Can you see how now, even many years later, a part of you may not want to overcome these panic attacks because you learned that they protect you? Perhaps part of you, even if just subconsciously, still feels that you need the panic attacks to help you get out of scary things—like being humiliated or embarrassed by your peers. This type of scenario could prevent you from being in alignment with full healing. Alignment with our goal is something that we all need to pay very close attention to. Blocks that cause resistance to healing show up most commonly in people who experience “nothing working,” or every treatment making them feel worse.
The body’s language is also a great indicator of what emotional energy from the past or what current patterns need to be addressed and cleared for full and complete healing. The body’s symptoms are full of clues, messages, and metaphors that can help us identify exactly what needs to be healed inside. A huge key to healing, as you’ll learn, is actually finding what is standing in your way of it. Once you do that, you’ll be well on your way.
Part Three: Change Your Relationship with Stress
Stress is a buzzword we all hear often. But remember, stress itself is not actually the gigantic problem that we think it is. It’s your relationship with stress that is
the problem. It’s important to identify and transform your relationship with stress instead of trying to eliminate stress itself. If you are experiencing physical symptoms, we can safely assume that your immune system is being suppressed—and your relationship with stress is a big reason why. And, if you are experiencing only emotional challenges, well, that makes it even more apparent that this stress factor is important to address.
The stressful reactions in your body come from things like these:
• Unprocessed experiences
• Harmful beliefs
• Unhealthy emotional patterns
• Fear
All of these aspects affect how you relate and respond in your life. Changing your relationship with stress by working with these main areas will have a huge impact on your life. Huge.
Now that you have a rundown of the process, it’s time to move on and get into some practice. Next, in Section II , we’ll be doing just that.
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2 . Herbert Benson, MD, RelaxationResponse.org , www.relaxationresponse.org.
Section II
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A Tried-and-True
Healing Process
Part One
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Surrender, Accept, and Flow
Imagine you are swimming in the ocean, a mile out. The sky is blue and the world feels beautiful. But a minute later, everything changes. Where did these clouds come from? you think. Why is the water so rough? You start to fear for your safety, and you start to fight. You kick and flail and use every ounce of energy to stay afloat. In the first five minutes you have exhausted yourself, and now your head is barely above water.