The Path to Conviction

The most essential question to mind body work and the healing path in general is how you come to believe something about yourself, your experience, others, and the world when you do not. When you are first hit with pain, illness, emotional strife, or discomfort of any kind, the first step typically involves seeking out healers, receiving various diagnoses or prognoses, and wrestling with the questions of how and why. If you are at a place of readiness, you may call the right information into your life and set the stage to find conviction. However, if you find yourself receiving mixed messages and feel unclear around how to understand or move forward, you are likely being invited to challenge the inner fears and doubts emerging within you. The fear and doubt you carry surrounding your mind body experience is the essence of your work. The experience itself is only there to get your attention and to show you that you must find conviction in your life in order to chart the trajectory toward growth and expansion. Regardless of whether the experience manifests in the physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual realm, all mind body experiences are an invitation to release the emotion and belief trauma you carry and to grow closer to your full potential as a human being. Conviction is not only about healing from pain or disease, but also from the doubts that have been sewed around certain aspect of your life - relationships, career, health, self, you name it. Conviction is at the core of your path to fully realizing your truth, your power, and who you are meant to be.

I invite you to consider that your ability to receive and trust information from others depends on where you are at in your own journey toward understanding the mind body experience. For example, if you have only known back pain as a purely physical manifestation, you may not yet trust other perspectives and yet, if your pain persists, you may be left confused and disheartened until you are open to another level of understanding. This happens at a different pace for everyone depending on the traumas you carry and the influences of your environment. With the presence of new information, you may get triggered or feel defensive since new ways of understanding yourself and your world can feel threatening. But with openness and readiness, you will begin to learn. As you learn, you expand not just your knowledge but your capacity to heal. The phrase “knowledge is power” is true in more ways than one. Knowledge becomes energy in the body and guides you toward healing, rewiring your brain in the process. As you witness your experience change, you develop more conviction in your ability to heal and to discern what information is meant for you.

For every expert practitioner you encounter in the traditional fields of medicine, psychology, or beyond, you may get a different perspective or answer. If you are just opening up to the possibilities of what your suffering may mean, you may find yourself overwhelmed with a confounding array of potential meanings and outcomes. The variability in opinions across the spectrum of healing may exacerbate your brain’s fear-based thinking that seeps into the cracks of your conviction like water in a leaky roof. On the path toward conviction, all doubts become exposed one by one. Each individual fear and doubt is an invitation to clear the energy keeping you stuck.

For every physical sensation, thought, emotion, and experience, there are 10x as many diagnostic labels to go along with it. Certainly, medical doctors can be useful in identifying illness, disease, and structural abnormality in the body that modern research and evidence shows to be true. However, the traditional medical and psychological systems of assessment and diagnosis are not yet caught up to the rapid evolution in understanding of trauma and its manifestations in the mind body experience. Does illness, disease, and structural abnormality exist? Yes. Do we know exactly what can change and what cannot? No. Many experiences previously thought of as “chronic” or “incurable” are simply not the case or, at least, they do not have to be. All of this is to say it will ultimately be up to you to choose the path of understanding and healing meant for you.

In the wild world of differing theories, perspectives, research, and belief, you may easily find yourself overwhelmed and unsure in the path meant for you. I cannot convince you to see it my way or anyone else’s, nor should I. What I can help you discover is how to listen to yourself. The process starts by recognizing the layers of fear and doubt pervading your inner view. As you recognize these fears and doubts, you also recognize that they are not you and you have the power to choose what to believe and what to practice. As you continue to challenge the fears and doubts and set your intention to heal, you will begin to call the necessary people, tools, and practices into your life to guide you. You do not have to have all the answers, all you have to do is create space and be willing to let the quieter voice within you speak. With courage, you can begin to understand what you must be with and what you can move through.

Over the course of my personal journey, I have learned my body very well. I am confident in my ability to be with and move through mind body experiences. However, my mind still produces doubts, just like yours. My experience has shown me that I am able to move through a variety of experiences that might otherwise be confused for something “chronic” or in need of medical attention. I know my truth and continue to realize it every day. I cannot speak for yours nor can I give you full conviction in what your Mind Body Experience requires, but what I can do is show you the way to your own understanding in order to meet your truth. There is no clear road map or protocol that will lay out your specific needs to guide you in what each moment demands, but the more you engage with this journey, the more courage, clarity, and conviction you will find in each opportunity that invites you to expand.

The path to conviction is an art not an algorithm, a practice not a pill. Conviction is a dance between the witnessing of your own experience and the support you receive from your environment along the way. Once you set your intention to heal, you will ebb and flow between the guidance you receive and the changes that take place within. As begin to witness the transformation within your own mind and body, your belief will become conviction and your conviction will become knowing. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, healing is a synergy between the inner and the outer that picks up speed as you go toward it. The more you believe, the more you transform. The more you transform, the more you believe. Eventually, all healing paths merge into one, and your conviction runs through it.