by Amy B. Scher
Eventually you might realize you’ve been doing and surviving for a long while, more than you ever thought you could. The fact that you’re still waking up, and finding new days to try new ways of living, says you’re pretty darn good at it. When you start to see that, you’ll feel better and better. You’ll start to slowly sneak away from the struggle until one day you’ll wake up and, without even trying, it won’t be so hard anymore. You won’t be doing it. You’ll have done it!
Because I know what it’s like when feeling good seems to be lightyears away, I want you to have insights to help you be more comfortable as you go through the process. You’re setting a new and healthier pattern, one that keeps on saying to your body through redirection of the energy, “This way is better.” So practice the techniques you’ve learned throughout the book, wake up each morning, rinse, and repeat. Hopefully these final insights will provide an extra boost for you along the way.
Learn to Trust
Don’t get attached to how healing “should be” or get judgmental about the process. Our “should-be’s” create far more emotional and physical stress than the actual event that we’re “should-be-ing” about. You are where you are and that’s it. It’s happening how it’s happening and that’s that. Try to relax into how it’s all unfolding and I promise you’ll be where you want to be a whole lot faster.
Each thing you experience—in every minute, hour, and day—whether it appears to be for your benefit or against it, is part of a larger picture. It’s all necessary. See it as just that. Stop weighing how much it’s worth and just trust that in some way it’s necessary for your path simply because it is happening—even through lots of twists and turns that make it look like your goal is lost.
There is a reason for everything that happens in your life: it’s getting you somewhere good, it’s getting you away from something not so good, or it’s happening because it needs to get your attention. Trust that the universe is talking to you and trying to sidestep you into exactly where you need to be. It’s all part of the game.
During a trip to India that I took in 2009, two years after my initial trip for stem cells, something happened that was greater than anything I could have ever plotted myself. The night before my plane was to leave for home, I had terrible food poisoning (they call it “Delhi belly”). Hang on, we haven’t gotten to the incredible part yet! I was vomiting into a plastic bag, desperate for the comforts of home, yet I knew there was no way I could get on a flight. I called the airline in desperation, and they agreed to reschedule my flight with no penalty or fee.
Days later as I recovered at the hospital, a girl named Charlotte came to visit her mother, who was also a patient at the hospital. My eyes met Charlotte’s across the physical therapy room, and in a total plot twist, we fell in love.
Years after that, when my symptoms started to flood back during that trip to London, I was forced to muddle my way through the painful process of healing, having believed illness was already far behind me. This time, though, I had no doctors to rely on. I had to rely on me. And through it, I found myself, and this beautiful work that I get to share with so many people every single day. I have been happier and healthier than ever before.
In 2007 when I made the difficult decision to go to India for stem cells, I never imagined that India would turn out to be such an important part of a bigger picture—part of me meeting my now-wife and of me turning inward for my ultimate healing. I’ve seen now, countless times, that things often fall apart so they can piece themselves back together again, but in a better way—a universal upgrade of sorts.
Be Open to a Change in Your Story
This is so important that I almost want to scream it at you! It’s easy to keep telling ourselves the same old story: I don’t feel good. I still have so much fear. I’m crying all the time. My body hurts. But noticing your healing improvements requires eyes that are looking for them. Make sure your eyes are open.
Healing can show up in subtle ways and may look like one of these examples:
• You had a physical or emotional meltdown, but you bounced back even slightly better or faster than the last time.
• After you went out to do something fun, you didn’t crash for two days, but just one instead.
• You normally hold on to anger for a long time when someone hurts you. This time when you got hurt, you got just as mad, but you let it go sooner than usual.
• You get tired so easily, but now you walk with a little more pep in your step before totally crashing.
• You get just as tired, but you don’t beat yourself up about it as much.
• You just stopped and rested. (A huge sign of emotional healing is being easier on yourself, which then helps to free up energy for physical healing.)
Give Yourself Permission to Find What Works for You
A journal entry from two days before my trip to India in 2007 read: I hereby vow to heal in every way I can during this trip. I will stretch my healing boundaries and try whatever comes my way. Even the weird shit.
My kick-start eventually arrived on its own when Dr. Shroff announced she had hired a yogi to teach classes in the hospital’s physical therapy room. Everyone I knew who did yoga looooved it. The class was to be held three times a week, free to patients and their families.
Our teacher, Rohit, was easy to read instantly. He was all about the practice and absolutely no fun. Week after week, he directed us to perform our first impossible move and expected nothing less from me than to at least “try, try!” when I insisted aloud that I don’t bend that way. “Keep working on your breath. Breeeeaaath makes miracles,” he said repeatedly.
I wished I was in love with yoga. I desperately wanted to be one of those students who felt transformed on the mat, wouldn’t miss a class, and made my master proud. I was determined to allow myself to quit only after I found the joy everyone else seemed to have in this practice. One day, when Rohit finally stopped reminding me about my form and breathing, I realized I had succeeded. At the end of each session, he always proclaimed, “You are now light and free!” And surprisingly, after hearing him bark for an entire hour in his weighty Indian accent that day, I kinda did feel that way. But during the next class, I was back to dreaming of wandering the city and counting sweat droplets that were falling from my head. That’s when I decided that it was my time to exit yogaland gracefully.
Life, like yoga, is all about being okay with exactly where you are. Based on those parameters, I decided I had mastered enough of this practice. I ducked out when the class was over, proud and calm, but mostly relieved that for rest of my trip I could breathe any damn way I wanted. Yoga is amazing, I know. Rohit was dedicated and surely would have helped me become a more limber and disciplined person. But yoga is not for me. And when I became okay with that, I moved on to things that catapulted me further toward health.
Falling into a similar internal-pressure trap when I was first learning about energy therapy, I read a ridiculous number of books on energy therapy, emotional trauma, and mind-body-spirit healing. I studied every program and consumed all of the information I could find on the subjects. What I realized at some point, exhausted by that approach, was that we don’t always need more: more knowledge, more training, more searching. We just need to find what feels good to us and be with it.
If you resonate deeply with three techniques out of all of them in this book, you have enough to work with. If you resonate with only one technique, you have enough. You’ll find a way to use it for everything and be successful. It’s not about the quantity; it’s about the connection.
Never follow a path, stick with a plan, or convince yourself to agree with anything unless your soul is giving you an affirmative nod. Your healing path will be a unique one, so while you’re on your search, be open to everything, but only throw your energy into something that resonates—and know there is a deeper reason you’re diggin’ it. Or not.
Maintain a Balanced Focus
There is a learned balance that
will come, in time, between making your healing important and making it your entire all-consuming focus.
Just because you know a new technique or approach and have tapped into your own power doesn’t mean this should become your life (even though I totally understand the temptation). The concept of “too much of a good thing” is true here for a couple of solid reasons.
First, with energy work, as we briefly touched on earlier, there is a processing that happens as that energy moves out of our field. Until that happens, we might not feel the full shift or improvement. This is similar to how eating doesn’t always provide instant fullness. If you just keep eating without seeing how it all settles, you’ll do much more harm than good. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of giving your body time and space to allow the healing process to happen. Remember, you are trying to create a solution, not more problems—which is precisely what you will do if you push yourself too hard.
Next, focusing too much on something you don’t want isn’t helpful, which we learned in Chapter Four in regard to the law of attraction. While being active in your healing is beneficial, making your whole life about your healing is absolutely not. Your world (activities, entertainment, and people) must consist of more than this one goal or focus.
Everyone will have a different way of shifting their focus to achieve this balance. I personally did this in a few different ways. I sometimes drank wine even while knowing green juice would surely be healthier. I watched Golden Girls marathons and B-rated movies for hours on end when I could have been meditating. I ate fettuccine Alfredo on occasion, even though I knew dairy could increase inflammation in my body. I did things just for pure pleasure or fun, because pleasure and fun are healing. What I’m saying here is really this: Don’t limit your reading list to only books about healing; keep the mindless summer reads, too. Don’t be terrified of one bite of sugar. Don’t cut yourself off from the reality of life and bury yourself further into a world you are trying to separate from. Because in the big picture, it just doesn’t make you or break you. In the big picture, giving yourself more no’s does one thing and one thing only: it creates a focus on what you don’t have. And absolutely no healing comes from that.
There, I let you off the hook. Integrate these practices you’ve learned into your life. Embrace them fully, but don’t over-focus and exhaust yourself. Find that balance.
Seek Support
Sometimes the journey can be lonely. We just want someone to understand, cry with us, or shake us out of our current rut. Sometimes we just need help getting to the next step. There is a good reason to ask for help, from either a friend or a professional, and it’s not because self-healing doesn’t work. It may be true that you can heal yourself, but everything is easier when we have a little tribe to help us. You do need to be responsible for your own journey, but you don’t have to do it alone.
If you are not working with a professional regularly, check in with yourself to see if it might be beneficial to work with one, at least occasionally. Here’s why. A professional has seen hundreds and hundreds of clients, and you’ve only had experience with, well, you. People who do this all day long have seen different patterns and issues emerge, which gives them an advantage—they can often quickly see what you can’t. Not only that, but this is an amazing way to learn how and what to apply for yourself. You will get to see how a professional unravels issues and what they do when they get stuck. You may even hear a story from their own journey that will generate new ideas for your healing.
I regularly have clients who “graduate” from working with me regularly in one-on-one sessions and then contact me for a check-in appointment here and there. They fill me in on what’s going on and share any stumbling blocks. From there, I’m always able to give them new ideas or direction they can take on their own for more healing and clearing. This gives them a great new jumping-off point and a little reassurance when they need some confirmation that they are doing just fine. Giving your power away and asking for support are two totally different things. Seeking insight, advice, ideas, and a boost will often allow you to take your healing to the next level.
If you are unable to work with a professional or are uncomfortable doing so, find someone who will help you raise your vibration and help you focus on solutions to feeling better right now. Do not ask for help from those who are struggling too much themselves and are likely to have “contagious panic energy.” If you don’t have the tribe you desire, you may need to get creative. Find people who lift you up. If you don’t have a strong support system in family and friends, look elsewhere. It doesn’t take hours of phone time; sometimes just a familiar face and a smile from a neighbor or grocery clerk can truly make a difference.
Always know, too, that you have support from angels, relatives on the other side, and more. You simply need to ask for their help. So often I would, and still do to this day, call out and ask for help from my invisible tribe. You might laugh if you are new to this idea, but they always come through.
Your support system is anyone or anything that makes you feel sturdier and surrounded with comfort. There are opportunities all around. It’s your new job to seek them out.
My Final Note to You
I am not good with endings or goodbyes. I never love writing the last sentence of a book. It often feels sad to part with it all, and by that point, I always wonder, what more of importance can I say that I haven’t already said? But there’s still something left here—words that I want you to remember in every part of your being.
This is the beginning.
Now is your time. Through this work, you get to experience who you really are and unbury yourself from who you thought you should be.
You get to—possibly for the first time—notice who you are separate from fear, this challenge, this illness. You get to discover your true purpose, which is not at all what you thought it was before. When I was at my sickest in India, Dr. Shroff said to me, “You need to find a purpose. You will heal when you find a purpose. You will heal when you follow your heart.” While I didn’t understand this at the time, and was convinced my heart had no idea where to lead me anyway, I later came to see exactly what she meant. She wanted me to have something so important to me that I would move beyond what kept me “living small.” It wasn’t necessarily the passion or the purpose that was important, but more so the distraction from worrying that I wasn’t good enough. Because I had work to do. I had places to go. I had people to meet. I had my light to shine. Dr. Shroff wanted me to connect with myself on a deeper level, and having a purpose makes you do that. However, in my delicate state, I amassed an army of internal pressure against myself, adding to my chore list: Find purpose.
I wish someone had said this to me at that moment:
When you finally realize that your purpose, and your natural-born right, is only to be happy with who you really are—whether you are a healer or a comedian or someone who smiles at strangers—you trigger a process inside of yourself that is infinitely bigger than whatever is standing in your way at this moment. Happiness is your purpose. And you will come to see, at the end of all your exhaustive searching, that your purpose has never been external. It has not been to make sure others are happy with you. It has not been to be perfect. It has been, from your first day here, to simply allow your expression without thought or hindrance. It doesn’t matter where you start, because from that place of whoever you are at the core, you will naturally expand outward into any other secondary missions you may have in this lifetime. Everything is channeled through that first insanely important purpose, which is to find yourself and stay there. It’s the spark, the impetus, that sets everything else in motion.
While we have covered massive ground in this book, all that you have learned can be boiled down to a few things that make up the formula for true healing.
You must …
• become who you really are.
• learn to be easy on yourself, and love yourself.
• trust that you can b
e okay, no matter what.
This may seem overly simplified, but these things will do for you what nothing else can. These are the things that will help you heal in the deepest spaces of your being.
Whether you have read this book and believe you have the power to heal, or you have read this book and aren’t quite sure yet, it’s okay. Healing takes courage and grace and a sharp turn in the direction away from so much of what you know. But it also takes a fair share of messy, crying-on-the-floor drowning in doubt. During these days, know that you are doing some of your biggest work, too. You are doing what you should have been doing all along. You are doing you . You are acting from your true authenticity, free from the filtering or stifling that you came to learn somewhere along the way. Haruki Murakami, in his book Kafka on the Shore, wrote: “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole lotta love to heal. The real truth, though, is that the only love you really need is yours. Healing is sometimes difficult and scary, but remember, you were born brave. You are ready.
[contents]
***************
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. What are your greatest fears around healing?
2. If you could frame your healing journey as a book, what would the title be?
3. What was your aha moment in the book? Why?
4. Is there anything you disagree with or don’t resonate with from the book? Why?