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.

A is For: Awareness Through Breath

Your journey begins with awareness. When you suffer, your awareness narrows like a dark tunnel with only a dim light at the end to be seen, if that. As you set your intention to heal, your awareness grows. The tunnel widens and light filters in, even as you continue to get hit with pain sensations, because you begin to recognize how expansive and powerful you really are. The first step of expanding awareness is to recognize that you are more than just the pain signals or the challenging emotions and beliefs you carry. You are more than just your mind or your racing thoughts. Awareness sets the stage for healing because all tools and practices flow from the awareness of possibilities within you. Awareness itself is a practice not a pill, an art not an algorithm. Awareness does not happen only in one moment and remain on like an eternal lightbulb; it is more like a pair of prescription glasses meant to be worn at all times, but easily misplaced or forgotten, narrowing your view of yourself, others, and the world as a result. The practice of awareness is the practice of remembering. There will inevitably be moments, many moments in fact, in which you forget how expansive you truly are no matter how many times you have remembered. Therefore, the practice of awareness is also the practice of forgiveness. You remember, you forget, and you remember again. One of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to facilitate the process of remembering is the breath. The breath activates your vagus nerve, brings safety to your nervous system, and reconnects you to your body. Your breath contains the essence of life that is available to you in every moment and yet so easily forgotten. Breath holds the key to unlocking your awareness in every moment and remaining connected to the present. The present moment is where all peace, all creation, all healing, and all experience unfolds. As you breathe, you remember awareness. As you remember awareness, you become present. In the present, you are expansive.

Therefore, the A in D.A.N.C.E. is for: Awareness Through Breath

When you let the conditioned fear patterns in your brain lead, you live strictly in the past or projected into the future. When you expand your awareness with the breath you notice the sensations occurring in present time. With practice, your breath invites you to dance with your experience and let the fear-based stories fall away for the moment. The breath reminds you of your safety and your power to be with any specific mental or physical states that arise. At any one time, you may notice a physical sensation, a thought, or an emotion, but never is one of these things the entirety of your mind body experience. When it comes to pain symptoms, your brain will always prey on them like a fly drawn to a piece of fruit. Pain or discomfort represent juicy morsels of opportunity for your brain to activate its learned fear and doubt patterns, sucking you down into familiar places of despair and hopelessness. In such moments, you must remember that you are not defined by these patterns. With breath, you notice other sensations and experiences taking place in your body alongside the discomfort. With expanded awareness, you recognize that the story of urgency or panic taking shape is not necessarily true but merely a brain-driven reaction to the sensation. The power of the breath provides the strength and courage to be with and move through whatever experience is showing up and, ultimately, to transform it. Learn to dance with your body while loosening the controls of your mind.

Have you ever tried to dance by thinking through all of your moves? Does it look graceful? Even if you are a professional dancer with planned choreography, you rehearse it enough times to know it in your body so you can relieve your thinking mind. Your breath provides the natural rhythm or soundtrack for your life and your body has more innate intelligence than your brain. Therefore, it is most beneficial to remember in any moment that you are an embodied being and the pathway to safety and ease is through your breath.

It makes logical sense if you have been neglecting or avoiding your body-based experience in order to avoid the pain or discomfort. Your brain’s mechanisms of protection revolve around thinking and escape. It is very powerful in the area of problem solving and it attempts to use this hammer when everything looks like a nail. However, the brain also remains primitive in a lot of ways. The fear-based mechanisms of survival move you into a state of “fight or flight” as a reaction to perceived danger or threat. What do you imagine is the first result of your brain’s stress response? Your body tightens, your lings constrict, and your breath - along with your awareness - narrows. Athletes, emergency care specialists, and other professionals in high-intensity situations all train specifically to control the breath in order to remain calm under pressure and optimize performance. In moments of complexity, you may believe you are best served by “figuring things out” with the mind when in actuality you are maintaining a state of dysregulation in your nervous system and running through loops of fear-based thoughts. Though logic and reason are surely useful, your answers for the body do not live in the thinking process. Even Elon Musk needs to be with his embodied experience if he wants to learn about his emotions states, activate relaxation, and release pain. Logic and reason play a role in how you can shift your thinking and practice conviction, but the process of actually being with your experience requires present-focused awareness, and the best tool for that is your breath.

Breathwork is a beautiful area of healing because of how integrated it is. It acts as a meeting place for knowledge across the spectrum of traditional western science and cultural, yogic traditions dating back centuries. The overlapping information from various sources is the greatest form of conviction in a given healing practice. As a result, there are many, many effective breathwork techniques and many more to be discovered. Check out the “Resources” section of my website for a few of my favorites across the spectrum of healing traditions.

The answers to your unfolding experience live within the body. The body, though also a container for the memories and lineages of your past, is attuned to your present experience at all times. The breath is your key to expand your awareness and access this state of presence always available to you. I invite you to practice dancing to the rhythm of your breath.

The Source of Healing Lives Within

Society conditions you to look for healing outside of yourself. You naturally look for medicine of all kinds in the external world, whether they be drugs, plants, exercise, therapies, or any treatment modality you can think of. To be clear, all of these things can be great medicines and utilized to great effect at certain times; however, when you approach healing as something that takes place outside of you, you may naturally come to it from a place of brokenness needing to be fixed. From this belief, you give your power away to your medicines of choice and may become dependent on them because you do not believe the source of healing lives within. This is a limiting belief. You have the power to heal within you. You simply need to clear the blockages in your path to this intuitive power and conviction. Medicines facilitate the process but they are not the source themselves, they are only tools. If you believe you need yoga, meditation, or a pill every day to heal, consider the idea that these things only facilitate, guide, and awaken your innate healing ability. You are the healer, not the things. Once you start to wake up to this idea, you begin to relinquish your dependency. The medicines no longer remain things you need, but become things you call into your life out of love for yourself and your desire to transform. You can learn to honor the various medicines you call in, while also remembering the source of power within you.

The best way to access this innate ability is to create the optimal environment within your body for the inner work to take place. Worry less about how the healing will take place and focus more on clearing the blockages in your way. Like an air traffic controller, you do not need to fly the plane, you only need to clear the runway for takeoff. You are an energetic being and all energies you take in - from people, places, food, substances, etc. - matters. The journey may not feel so good at first because as you go toward the light and clear away the external energies that no longer serve you, the first thing to show up is the emotional trauma that has been holding you back. From a westernized medical model, the first line of defense against challenging experiences is typically to manage them, numb them, surgically remove them, or generally make them go away in the quickest fashion. However, with this approach you never learn what they have to teach you or the reason they are showing up in the first place. Furthermore, with such external remedies you may never learn to see the power within you to be with, move through, and transform the experiences that are showing up. If you never give yourself the chance to summon your inner resources, it only makes sense that you would doubt you have any at all.

If the body has the capacity to produce fever in order to fight infection, it is not a stretch to think it has the ability to process and release emotional trauma and rewire the brain. Unfortunately, society does not arm you with the tools to recognize what is showing up within you and how to be with it, which is why more psychoeducation is needed in this area. Healing modalities, as long as they are used intentionally to support your own growth and expansion, are of immense benefit in supporting you to activate what already lives within you. Movement, meditation, visualization, and journaling are examples of worthy practices that aid you in changing your inner state and readying yourself for healing. When you sit down to meditate and allow challenging emotions, thoughts, or physical sensations to surface, you are welcoming in the old and outdated patterns meant to be altered. Something as seemingly simple as a daily gratitude practice and breathwork helps you refocus your attention on what is most important without disavowing or denying challenging experience. By continuously reconnecting to the expansive harmony of your body’s natural rhythm, you are able to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, bring safety to your experience, and upgrade your body on a molecular level. Contrary to traditional forms of medicine, you do not have to sacrifice or delay one aspect of healing in order to welcome in another. You do not have to suppress natural fighting entities in order to kill off an toxic intruder. Traditional medicine serves a valuable purpose and these words are not meant to make you choose one or the other. The worlds are only here to invite you to see the deepest source of healing is not a pill, a machine, a technology, or a healer’s hands, though those things do help. The journey starts and ends with you and you are powerful beyond measure.

One way to recognize your influence is to see how easy it is to remain stuck despite using all sorts of healing modalities. Look around you and see how many people are still holding onto their traumas, still trapped in grief, anger, shame, and despair despite years of therapies, pills, energy work, plant medicine, exercise, meditation, dieting etc. If the healing was truly in the modality, would it not have worked by now? If you know people like this, they are evidence that no modality can do the work for you. It is not to say that these modalities are not incredibly useful for those individuals even if they remain stuck in certain areas, it is a practice after all; it is only to call your attention to the fact that healing happens when a source within you is ready. Ready to open, ready to let go, ready to release, and ready to practice with intention. If it takes 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, it does not matter. That is not the point. The point is that when true readiness happens within you, you begin to know on a deeper level that transformation is coming and it does not matter what modality helps you get there. As the proverb goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Your readiness is what sets off the big bang of healing within your universe. If you find yourself always seeking the next transformational healer, book, podcast, drug, food, or shampoo that is going to change your life, I invite you to reflect on the place this seeking comes from. I identified as a seeker for many years so please do not misunderstand my words. There is nothing wrong with seeking; however, I invite you to recognize the place your seeking comes from. If it comes from a place of lack, you will always be chasing things to fill you up. If you begin to recognize that maybe, just maybe, you have the power within you to heal, you can begin seeking people, places, and things that guide you to activate your own power like keys that fit within your treasure box, unlocking the healing treasures that lived within you all along.

“The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.” - Robert Pirsig

As Pirsig poignantly stated in his cult classic, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” the peace or healing you may find by seeking outside yourself may be the peace or healing that lived within you all along. And sometimes you need to climb the mountain! My point is not to say you do not need healing modalities, it is to say that the intention you bring to a given space, modality, substance, or experience is what ultimately allows you to transform or stay stuck. Much research has been done on the placebo effect for example, which, rather than seen as devoid of healing property and intentionally rooted out in studies, should be harnessed for the wisdom that it conveys. The brain can actually be convinced to activate healing within you simply based on the power of suggestion and belief. What a miracle!

So, what is this treasure box of healing within you that can rewire your brain, activate immune functioning, release emotional trauma, and heal pain? It is likely not just one thing. From my perspective, which involves my own training, healing, and witnessing experience, there is a deeper, more spiritual readiness that takes place within the emotional body and mind - some form of connection to a deeper truth within you. When this part of you begins to say “Yes” to the experience of healing, you may find yourself open to healing modalities that you had previously not considered or scoffed at, and they may have something to offer because you have already set the stage. Now all you must do is invite them up to the mic to share their gifts as you allow yourself to receive their medicine. If you notice resistance to seeking beyond what you have considered helpful in the past, reflect on what limiting beliefs you may need to be let go of in order to move forward. What possibilities are you still not ready to consider for yourself? This is the edge of your knowing - the realm of fear and doubt. It is not a comfortable place, but it is a fertile place - a place of transformation. When you are brought to the edge of your brain’s logical understanding, it triggers all the limiting beliefs holding you back, keeping you stuck, and maintaining your perceived sense of safety. From your brain’s perspective, suffering is safer and more comfortable than journeying into the realm of not knowing. Your doubts may say that this can be true for others but not for you, or that you are too weak or too dumb, or that science has not proven this yet, or that this is simply “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” victim blaming, or, or, or… the list goes on. You may simply not believe in it at all. I invite you to challenge your doubts for the moment - what have they ever done for you anyway? - and simply choose to consider that you are no different than me, and we are both capable of profound healing within. The more you allow yourself to sit at the edge of your knowing, the more you will breathe life into the voice that has always been there guiding you to answers beyond what your eyes can see and your mind can know.

I know that some may interpret my words as unreasonable positive thinking blaming sufferers for things out of their control. Please know this is not about blame or shame. I myself was a sufferer all my life and I do not consider myself fully healed, though my experience has qualitatively shifted. My words are only an invitation to crack the door open for your mind to consider the possibilities of hope and joy that await you. A powerful healer once told me I am a naturally hopeful person. The statement resonated deeply and brought me to tears because I had become so jaded and cynical from the layers of suffering pervading my view. Trust me, I know how easy it is to fall victim to the brain’s messaging and to the societal conditioning of those around you that do not understand or who are not yet prepared to take healing into their own hands. The placebo effect and the power of suggestion works on a societal level as much as an individual one. Your brain is quite susceptible to the conditioning and messaging you have been receiving all your life that you were meant to live in chronic pain, panic, or despair. Your brain has years of past experiences to support the message that you are not meant to heal. But just because you have been conditioned to believe such things does not mean they are true. I know I may sound like a conspiracy theorist at times, but I truly speak first and foremost from my own witnessing experience. The path of healing simply begins with a willingness to be surprised and to practice. Consider that you are not meant to understand exactly how the mystery of the mind and body work, but if you are willing to sit with not knowing in the ways you have always been taught and to not depend on the things you have always been given, you allow yourself to open to what is possible beyond the limits of your conditioning. With practice, you open the doors to the greatest medicine at your disposal - the immense power of the human spirit.

E Is For: Expand Your Beliefs With Emotion Energy

Emotions are energetic information in motion rooted in years of evolution to guide us to act in response to experience. Therefore, when they arise they present an invitation to move through your experience and return to harmony. One definition of trauma is stuck or trapped emotion memories in the body. When the nervous system is overwhelmed and cannot process the emotions showing up, it reacts with defenses that escape the feelings. This is a survival mechanism. Additionally, beliefs take shape about who you are, who others are, and what the world is based on these challenging experiences. You may come to see yourself as unworthy, others as deceitful, and the world as frightening and unfair. As a result, emotions are created and held within the body as traumatic memories of the experience that match the beliefs. There are countless stories of individuals carrying physical pain or stress in a particular area of the body that was involved in a traumatic incident. One way to understand the relationship between emotions and beliefs is that emotions represent the energetic communication or manifestation of a belief you are carrying. The belief may have been shaped by a particular incident or relationship in your lifetime or may have been transmitted intergenerationally. The extent of the emotions and beliefs you are carrying goes beyond your own experience and includes your ancestry. In other words, you do not come into this world as a blank slate, but already carrying certain beliefs on a cellular level related to the experiences of those who came before you. In the western world, this burdgeoning field of study is known as intergenerational trauma and still much is unknown, but I believe it will continue to prove these ideas over time.

The trapped emotion energy produces stress and decreases immune functioning within the body, which produces the optimal environment for disease. The pain you feel, particularly if it is perceived as chronic, is a communication of the emotional blockage and is meant to signal you that attention is needed. There are many modalities and many healers across the spectrum of mind, body, and spirit work who can facilitate the energetic release of emotional blockages. For the purpose of this blog and the practice of self-healing, I will speak only to the power of cultivating the emotion energy you want to experience in meditation paired with visualization, which upgrades your nervous system, rewires your brain, and facilitates the process of transformation in body, mind, and spirit to meet the truth of who you are becoming. As you sit in this cultivated energy in meditation and visualization, you rewire your brain to produce the emotions you are meant for rather than the reactive ones you have been carrying. As you practice moving toward the light, inevitably the blockages in your way arise and show you the darkness you are meant to be with and release. Fear, doubt, hesitation, shame, guilt, anger, etc. may show up and seem to derail your journey, but really they are invitations to release these energies you have been carrying all along. You may not understand where they come from, if they are even yours to begin with, or what beliefs they are associated with. Do not despair. All you need to do is create space within you to be with the energy and allow it to move through. Do not blame yourself for the emergence of such emotion energy, recognize it for what it is - the opportunity to transform. The emotion and belief energy that has been keeping you stuck all this time is the same energy that can propel you into the life you were meant to live. I invite you to choose, for the moment, the path of expansion in spite of any perceived stuckness. 

Most of us do not take the invitation to transform until we are desperate enough. I was always an emotion-driven person, but I considered them largely out of my control since this is the belief I held from my early life. It was not until I became debilitatingly sick that I took drastic steps to understand and release the emotion energy I was carrying, and to rewire the patterns of fear and doubt in my brain. Without this physical manifestation, I may not have done what was necessary to break the cycle of entrenched negative patterns of thinking and belief matched with the intensity of negative emotions, which pervaded my view and dictated my personal reality. When you live within this feedback loop, you attract people and situations into your life that align with this lower vibrational state and you remain unable to see the gifts life is offering you to transform. The combination of psychoeducation, brain rewiring practices, and emotion regulation techniques gave me the power to begin healing, releasing stuck emotion energy, and expanding my beliefs about myself. The foundational belief that allowed me to chart this path of healing was that my emotional sensitivity was not bad, negative, or unworthy. In fact, it was a powerful strength that just needed to be harnessed correctly.

We all carry this energetic information known as emotion within our bodies, but rarely are we taught how to understand it, how to process it, and, more importantly, how to use it to transform. As the educational system upgrades to recognize the importance of emotion in child development, there will inevitably be a lot less chronic pain and suffering in the world. From a biological perspective, the substrates of emotion are known as neuropeptides that live in the heart, gut, and immune system as much as the brain. This proves that emotions live throughout the body, and research now shows that the body communicates more with the brain than vice versa. Modern mind body research is catching up to the notion that intelligence lives as much within the gut and the heart as the brain due to the plethora of neuronal connections that live in these areas. More than energetic representations of your beliefs, emotions are a powerful source of information or intelligence beyond the brain. However, in order to listen clearly to their knowledge, you must practice being with, moving through, and releasing the limited and layered (traumatic) form of this energy that no longer serves you.

Your core beliefs about yourself, others, and the world are what shape your mind body experience. From your beliefs flow your personal reality. Therefore, consider that your emotions are the energetic response to these beliefs and the powerful messenger to your brain. If you acknowledge that the food you put into your body is energy, visualize the emotions you carry as an energy source feeding your brain from the inside every moment of every day. So if that energy source is comparable to McDonalds, it might seem tasty and familiar, but it is actually a stew of toxins your brain is feeding on making you sluggish and depressed. When you reflect on the sources of energy manifesting your sickness and disease, look no further – or no deeper – than the emotions you carry. To release your trapped emotions is to expand your limited beliefs about yourself that shape the filter you see the world through. The hardest question you may ask in the process of healing is how you come to believe something when you don’t. This, in my humble opinion, is the core therapeutic process - how to expand your belief system. The answer lies in the practice of releasing and transforming your emotion energy. Learn to release the emotions you have been carrying and with them you release the illusions that have been dictating your experience, sending messages to your brain, and manifesting your suffering.

The healing process is not a linear journey to the “core” of your being, but more like an interconnected dance between the parts of your mind, body, and spirit. You must learn to respect and honor yourself on each of these levels, and the level that is most overlooked is the one that deserves your attention the most - your beliefs in the form of emotion energy. Once you gain conviction in your beliefs that you are powerful enough to heal, you can believe you are powerful enough to live up to your highest intention and the true purpose of your soul on this planet. Your emotions are the energetic tools on your path to conviction. As you learn to use these tools to your advantage, what was once a source of great suffering can now be a source of great joy, inspiration, and freedom. You are not your emotions or do you have to live victimized by them. You have the choice to release the stuck emotional energy you have been carrying in order to harness the positive, life-affirming beliefs that align with your truth.

N Is For: New Neural Patterns

For those that place scientific research at the furthest edge of our capacity to know as human beings, there is not much more respectable than the field of neuroscience and the study of the human brain. Within this field of study, one of the most exciting concepts of the past three decades is the study of neuroplasticity and the notion that you can “rewire” your brain in order to heal from the damaging effects of stress-based trauma among other changes. When you are born, your infant brain carries a plethora of neurons, way more than you need, and over the course of a few years your brain forms millions of connections based on your early life experiences. Everything is new and everything is absorbed like it is the most important piece of knowledge in the universe, because it is to you! Though you do not come into this world as a blank slate, in some ways your brain is like Play-doh and molds into shape based on those early experiences. From childhood through adulthood, your brain goes through a process called synaptic pruning, which is the ridding of synapses - the connectors between neurons - that are no longer needed based on what your brain uses or is exposed to on a daily basis. You might refer to this general process as the neuroscience of learning. Simply put, your brain strengthens what it uses and discards what it does not. Neural patterns and connections form based on learning, experience, and the social conditions and expectations of your environment. There are benefits to this process as well as consequences. Ideally, you learn all of the knowledge, behaviors, emotions, and beliefs that support your highest intention for yourself and the world. However, the reality is that you enter the world in a brain and body already carrying some outdated software and settings of those who came before you, and as you navigate the world, your brain naturally tries to protect you from experiences it deems threatening, such as overwhelming emotions. This is the intergenerational process of human experience.

Certainly, some early life experiences are more damaging and detrimental than others and, like most things, traumatic experience and the brain’s capacity to respond resiliently is a spectrum. The spectrum of survival strategies depends on many factors both inherited and modeled and ranging from adaptive to maladaptive. There are no shortage of survival strategies to respond to and escape overwhelming emotional experience. The benefits of neuroplasticity are such that this is not as hardwired as was once previously thought. Your brain can change. So just as your hippocampus, responsible for longterm memory storage, can shrink and your amygdala, responsible for emotional reactivity to stress, can enlarge in response to traumatic events, your brain can also unlearn these responses and restore adaptive functioning. Factors like age, genetics, and the nature of the damage all play a role in how your brain can rewire, but the truth is that no one really knows the extent to which your brain can grow and heal. Specifically, your brain can unlearn the neural conditioning of your childhood, or of specific events, and create space for new patterning and neural connection that supports the life you were meant to live. Developing new neural pathways applies to all aspects of your life, including your brain’s communication of pain signals to your body and the chronicity of pain, fatigue, or sickness symptoms in your mind body experience.

Think of the brain like the wiring or code for your old belief and emotion patterns combined with primitive survival mechanisms it has learned over time. Though the brain has the capacity to change and grow, if you are not intentional with your practice to rewire and expose the brain to new experience, it will stay comfortable with what it knows. The brain knows how to protect you based on old survival mechanisms that likely no longer serve you and it requires courage - all that you can muster - to begin discarding these neural patterns and creating space for new ones.

Perceived threat or danger is the source of all your brain’s protection energy and it reacts to situations with a variety of basic physiological functions such as fight, flight, freeze, but also with more nuanced behavioral forms of protection or avoidance such as substance use, isolation, aggression, relational dependency, and many, many more. Your brain is a powerful problem solver but it is not so good at self-reflection and pivoting when one mode of protection is no longer serving you. This is where cultivating a deeper awareness of the breath and body creates space from your brain-derived modes of protection and gives you a deeper sense of who you are separate from your brain’s conditioning. Society conditions you to identify with the brain as it is celebrated it for all of its magnificence. And yes, the brain is quite magnificent in all its capacities for logic, reasoning, and complex problem solving. However, in the emotion and belief realm, the brain fails to acknowledge that you are more expansive, powerful, and safe than the traumas you carried into this world or the situations endured in this lifetime. A computer is only as powerful as its programming.

 A computer is only as powerful as its programming 

The evolutionary programming of the brain is always scanning for danger and threat. This mechanism helped humans survive in the earliest days of life and are some of the oldest structures in the brain. The brain’s reaction to threat happens faster than your conscious mind can catch up and your body is already responding before you recognize what you feel. This process proved to be of immense value throughout history when you needed to respond to your environment rapidly, and to this day it still serves you in a powerful way. However, over time this process has been left on or activated to the point where you are walking around in chronic states of hypervigilance and anxiety without recognizing it and, therefore, reacting automatically in ways that no longer serve you. The survival mechanism is no longer able to effectively detect what is actually a threat. Your brain, your whole nervous system in fact, needs an upgrade and this first happens by expanding your awareness to what is happening beneath the surface.

 You do not change a computer’s programming from within its programs. You do it with expanded awareness, tools, and knowledge of how the systems work. In the Sci-Fi thriller The Matrix, the crew did not change the matrix coding from within its illusory world, but from without. Your brain works the same way. You cannot change the neural networks from within the mental matrix that your brain produces. You must use a different source of knowing, whether you call it your ‘true self,’ your inner voice, your intuition or your awareness, it is a source that serves your highest and best intention for yourself and can guide you to make decisions that go against what your brain is constantly reacting to. If you find yourself living in fear not only as a result of external experiences, but as a result of the thoughts, beliefs, and emotions flowing within you, this is because your brain is still programmed by an outdated model, which detects danger and threat at every turn and react to inner and outer experiences out of fear. The story your brain creates is not the problem, it is the programming itself that continues to create the fear-based stories; you must be able to step outside the programming in order to grow and expand.

 As you expand your awareness of the body and recruit a different voice to quiet the mental chatter and brain-driven impulses, you will help the brain to recognize when it is not actually in danger. Think of it like waking from a dream. Your brain has been dreaming that you are in danger and sending repeated danger signals throughout the body, activating your sympathetic nervous system and manifesting pain. Instead of continuing with this programming and attempting to numb it with a pill, a food, or simply manage it, you need to create space for the source of discomfort to emerge - your emotions and beliefs. With practice, you can be with and move through the emotion and belief energy you carry and, therefore, change your brain.

Think of the beliefs and emotions you carry as fuel that is feeding your brain messages every moment of every day. If you are carrying traumatized, limiting, or negative beliefs and emotions, you are feeding your brain the equivalent of McDonald’s all day long. Your brain may become addicted to this type of fuel, similar to how you may find yourself addicted to the taste of McDonald’s food, but what you are really doing is feeding your brain toxins devoid of any real nutritional value. In order to change the neural patterns in your brain, you need to change the “food,” or messaging, it is receiving from within and without. Only then will your brain start to reorganize itself to align with the higher nutritional energy you are cultivating and, therefore, update its programming. You are not victim to the brain, you are a deeper source of knowing and, with expanded awareness, you can create new neural patterns that support the life you were meant to live.

D Is For: Daily Practice

Learn to D.A.N.C.E. with and through your mind body experience. Healing is an ebb and flow that requires flexibility in all forms. Sometimes firmness and sometimes gentleness; sometimes water and sometimes fire; sometimes surrender and sometimes challenge. Dance is vulnerable and powerful. When blockages appear, dance remains fluid. Dance moves you toward freedom even in stuckness, even in stillness you dance to the rhythms of the breath. As long as you are breathing, you are dancing. Dance is active and restful. It is within and without. When you remember how to dance with yourself, you remember how to dance with others. When you learn how to dance with your experience, you learn how to dance with life. Dance is an act of play and of expression, it knows no bounds. It is fast and slow, wild and contained. Dance meets the moment and nothing else. Dance has no past or future. Dance happens now. It is an art not an algorithm, a practice not a pill. Dance is the process of opening up to your experience and rising to meet the truth it brings each day. That is why D is for: Daily practice. 

The process of moving through pain is not a one-time fix. It is not one pill, one yoga class, one meditation, or one enlightened, healing moment. It is a daily practice and it happens by cultivating the optimal environment from which many healing moments can occur and build toward conviction. Like fertile soil, you water your practice each day. You do not wait to be inspired, you continuously create the environment for inspiration to flow. Each moment is an opportunity to be with and move through what shows up, and each moment is an opportunity for transformation.

As you learn to dance with your experience, you create new neural patterns in the brain, you change your state, you transform your emotion energy, and you expand your belief system. You break through the old stories and learned brain patterns previously dictating your experience, and you no longer live from a place of lack and limitation. You discover - through daily practice - the conviction that you can heal. This is the source from which all healing flows, but it takes practice. If you are Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie, maybe it happens in an instant. However, you do not heal by expecting to follow their path nor do you become a great basketball player by expecting to play like Michael Jordan. You can be inspired by those who were led courageously by Spirit to chart their own healing journeys and meet the truth of their own souls’ purpose, but you must put in the practice to discover the path meant for you. To choose the path of healing, you must make a commitment to yourself and say “Yes” to the opportunities meant for you.

After years of navigating debilitating sickness in the mornings, I began to transform it. I started waking up earlier and challenging the thoughts that were pulling me down into despair and helplessness. I summoned courage - all that I could muster - to bring myself out of bed and practice the dance. To practice the dance, you do not have to know where you are going, how you will get there, or how long it will take. You only have to set the intention and make the choice to do it. It is in these intentional moments that you begin to heal. For me, those mornings often included, and still do include, a variety of meditation, affirmation, visualization, manifestation, breathwork, movement, and writing but you must find what works for you. There is not just one way and no prescribed formula. The only prescription is setting the intention to practice daily, whatever you choose. Just choose something. A morning practice is an especially fertile time because of the emotion and belief energy you stew in overnight. Changing your state first thing in the morning allows you to harness this energy and transmute it, to rewire your brain and chart your day, and your life, down a different path.

Regardless of the practice, the goal is always the same - bring safety to your nervous system, expose your brain to new experience, and create space for emotion and belief energy to show up and release. As you do this, new inner experiences will begin to emerge each and every day. As you transform and move toward the light, old energies of sadness, fear, and anger may emerge, along with beliefs tied to experiences of long ago. Whatever shows up that day becomes the fuel - for writing, for being with, for transforming. You do not have solve anything, all you have to do is tolerate the emotion energy and ride the wave knowing it is carrying you to shore. Each time you create space for the emotion energy to emerge, the pain and fatigue energy will lose power and dissipate, leaving a powerful source of joy and inspiration in its wake. But remember, this is not a linear journey and there is no time limit or expectation on these practices, only the intention to practice. Even as I write to you now, I am not “fully healed,” whatever that means, but my experience is qualitatively different than it was. My practice has grown and evolved as I continue to dance with what shows up. I commit to daily practice because of my conviction in my healing power, and I have conviction in my healing power because of my commitment to daily practice.

If my words elicit fear or negative beliefs in any form, do not despair. Just commit to the practice and I guarantee your experience will begin to change. When moments of transformation come, they come quickly, but first you must set the stage. After 10 years of suffering, it only took one healer to remind me that my doubt-filled beliefs and emotion energy is what was maintaining my sickness. In that moment, I was ready to hear it and to recognize the limitation of my beliefs. In that moment, my practice had set the stage for me to hear what I needed to hear. That healing session was not just about the power of the words, but the energy that was willing to shift inside me and allow newfound conviction to enter. From there, I began to adjust, expand, and commit more to my daily practice. Remember it is not just about force of will, but about fluidity and flexibility. I had to learn to surrender as much as to fight. Daily practice is the fertile soil that allows for curative shifts in your belief system to take place. Do not wait for one cure or one healer, begin setting the stage now and practice. As you practice, you send a message to the universe that you are ready to be supported, to be guided, and to be answered; you may then watch as the healing opportunities present themselves to the stage. Healing is not embedded in any one external source or modality, it is in the stage you set through daily practice. The external sources are guides that will show up only when you are ready to receive them, and they can facilitate the healing within you only when you are ready to hear them. You are the announcer of your stage and the master of your mind body experience - you hold the power to heal. Continue to set the stage and to channel your power within, the rest will flow.

If you are wondering how specifically to cultivate a practice and what that may look like for you, you may reach out to me directly. Tools like meditation, breathwork, affirmation, visualization, manifestation, movement, and writing are just a few of the powerful tools available to you to transform and release the emotion and belief energy you are carrying. But there are many, many modalities that exist, and many that I myself have yet to discover. I may create more content in the future around how best to utilize some of these modalities as they have worked for me, but do not get too caught up in the details of the method, just start somewhere and see what resonates for you. The intention and the commitment to daily practice is what matters most. You choose health, you choose light, and you choose love - you cannot be destroyed.

New Emotions, Old Lessons

I have written a lot about old emotion and belief energy elicited by new events that the brain perceives or recognizes as threatening. This is the experience of trauma as I see it, though there are several layers to this game. There is the inherited animal-survival brain wired to scan for danger and threat, the ancestral lineage of generations past, the soul trauma of past lives and karmic lessons re-enacting. You might think how could one possibly sort through this mess. The gift is such that one not need go digging for the origins of each event because Spirit has a way of bringing all that needs to be addressed right to your door. All that is meant to be addressed in divine time and readiness is re-enacted for your viewing “pleasure” in the present. The brain has learned to perceive new situations as old ones and, therefore, triggers the same alert signals it did in the past. As a result, the emotions that were not processed during past events re-emerge in the present and appear attached to the current events. I will add that, from my spiritual perspective, not only does the brain perceive current events in this way but the energetic frequency you are vibrating at actually attracts circumstances similar to the one you are still learning from. Additionally, the beliefs that shaped as a result of the earlier circumstances re-emerge in the present and reinforce the current situation as a representation of the past. All of these elements – the brain, the energetic frequency, the emotions, the beliefs – contribute to an experience of interpretation that draws on outdated programming. I have often stated that the emotions that show up in a given moment are not new nor are they inherent to the situation, they are old stored emotions that have not yet had the opportunity to be effectively processed and released.

However, this begs the question of where emotions originate and if there are circumstances in which new emotions form and are elicited. The obvious answer is “Yes,” of course there are new emotions. Not only do you carry lineages of trauma and early life experience in your body, but you are exposed to new challenges on a daily basis, just like you and your ancestors were in the past. Experiences of loss, violence, abandonment, and isolation are all examples of challenging experiences that may be elicited by any number of daily circumstances. The question remains what combination of old and new belief energy is showing up in any given moment? How much is newly formed versus old storage. Here is where I will separate from more traditional modes of psychological thought and veer off into spiritual territory. As far as I understand, psychological theory would ultimately have you decipher which one it is, old or new. For example, is this romantic breakup a re-enactment of abandonment issues from your father or simply a traumatic experience with a challenging partner dynamic. This logic seems unreasonable to me. All situations re-enact the past. The new situation is not interpreted by a blank slate ready to be painted over only by the colors of experience, not even at birth. You are already carrying emotion and belief energy in addition to a brain that is wired to perceive new situations through an outdated lens. Furthermore, all circumstances through the spiritual lens are preordained medicines concocted via the mystical stew of universal alchemy and served up in perfect dosage for your highest growth and understanding. Each person, circumstance, conflict, and “bad day” is a medicine. There are no mistakes, no wasted time, and no “unlucky.” All is influenced by karmic inheritance. You might say, well what about free will. Good question. From my perspective, you have the freedom to resist what is being brought to your attention, though likely it will keep coming and you will remain stuck until you choose to surrender to the medicine and release the associated trauma. In this very concept of free will lies my answer for the formation of new emotion and belief energy. My sense is that no new emotions and beliefs form that are qualitatively different from old patterns, but that new ones of the same ilk may be re-enforced by repeated patterns and cycles when one is in a state of reactivity and resistance. Say that you are wrestling with grief over an early childhood loss and have resisted processing such emotion state. Any new experience of loss will be technically new but only in the sense that it is a new opportunity to heal. Each time you resist, reject, disavow, ignore, or escape the opportunity, you are reinforcing this old wound, like scratching open a cut that you will not let heal. You see the body wants to heal, all you must do is get out of the way. The thinking mind or ego is incessant upon escaping such feelings and deems them a threat to survival, thereby colluding with the brain to escape at all costs. In doing so, you allow the “new” formation of traumas to build on the foundation of old ones. Therefore, it is possible that new grief or sadness is shaped by the loss of a loved one, and yet, it is also the opportunity to process old grief and sadness. The mind body experience represents both the old emotion and belief energy that has not yet been released, in addition to the new emotion energy forming layers of scar tissue over an unhealed wound. The good news is as many times as you re-open the wound and refuse to give it space, you will always be invited back, such is the nature of healing.

The list of present opportunities to re-enact old pain is endless, all propagated by the thinking mind. The reactive thought energy to unfolding events triggers the formation of new emotions and beliefs based on outdated programming. Like a computer scanning the world through the lens of a virus, all input is grist for more of the same. However, you have the power to change your thoughts, and with that, transmute your emotions and unlearn your beliefs. You have the power to see your true nature, which extends far deeper than these surface level patterns. Only once you see the truth can you begin to decode the virus of the ego and its attachment to the traumatized self. Every situation presents an opportunity to learn from, be with, and move through whichever emotion or belief shows up as a result of the moment. The present is a medicine, maybe a sour tasting one at that, but an invitation all the same to make a different choice. In making this choice, you chart a new path not only for yourself but for the lineage of ancestors you carry and the many lives of your soul’s past. You are the greatest iteration of your Self to date and have the power to shed more of the old than ever before. The question of old or new is less important than seeing the moment as an opportunity – an invitation – to be with what shows up regardless of where it originated. The journey is not really about parsing out each piece of trauma with a neat label and origin story, but more so a willingness to be with the layers of sediment as they grace you with their presence and wash away, revealing a deeper truth of being in their wake. The older the layer, the more intense and attached the energy will likely be, signaling you that this is emerging from the root. Either way, the only way forward is through compassion and love, the only prayer is forgiveness. So be with it like the wind and know you are moving closer to the Light with every cycle of tension, every ebb, and every dark night. When the morning comes and the sun shines again, you will recognize an even greater ability to harness the light-filled emotion and belief energy that serves your highest self, intention, and vision.

C Is For: Change Your State

I have created an acronym for moving through mind body experience - D.A.N.C.E - because moving through pain is an art not an algorithm. Learning to D.A.N.C.E. is about seeing your mind body experience as an opportunity to transform emotion energy and old belief systems, to rewire your brain, and to find conviction. I will unfold the meaning of this metaphor over time as well as the acronym itself, which stems from what I have learned to be the most vital elements of the healing journey. I will share these in the order that I am intuitively guided to do so. C is for ‘Change Your State.’

On the healing path, it is a delicate dance between what you must accept and what you have the power to change. Your mind body experience - not to mention your personality - may feel static or unchangeable, but this is far from the truth. You must create space within you to challenge the old brain patterns and discover new ways of being with your experience. A lot of mind body practitioners speak about “figuring out” what emotion or belief is showing up when physical sensations emerge, and if you are able to do this, more power to you. But I first needed to see that I could change the nature of my experience before I was able to identify what was showing up. While mired in sickness, my nervous system was severely dysregulated, which makes it quite difficult to access feelings. As a protective mechanism, I was often stuck in the thinking mind, which did not produce much good in searching for answers. As a result, I stayed stuck, consumed by the sensations and by my fearful, brain-based associations to them. As I used my thinking mind to attempt to get unstuck and analyze the situation, I only fed more power to the sensations and sunk deeper into feelings of helplessness, frustration, and despair. The thinking mind is not powerful enough on its own to see through the illusion of your physical experience. You need a deeper source of conviction to see yourself as the energetic being who can transmute the energy within you and rewire your brain as a result.

To identify a mind body experience, you first have to know - truly know - that there is an underlying emotional and belief-oriented origin that is being protected. Once you begin to know this with conviction, you can change your association to the experience. Specifically, once you know your physical body is safe, you have the power to challenge the fear-based associations to your pain.

The actual process of creating space may be different for everyone, but I have found that the thinking mind does not serve me in these moments. You first have to change the story associated with the experience. Think of yourself like an observer saying, “No, thank you” to the fear-based thinking that attempts to lead the conversation in the moment. The part of you that can say, “No, thank you” is the deeper part of your awareness that knows you are not your thinking mind. I have found that one of the most effective ways to change the story is by first changing your environment. Changing your physical environment exposes your brain to a safer way of being with the energy showing up and immediately takes power away from the dominant story associated to it.

Some form of physical activity is a great option to change your state, but it has nothing to do with the intensity of your activity and everything to do with the opportunity to bring positive energy to your mind body experience and create space for safety, power, and conviction. For example, simply getting out of bed in the morning is one of the most powerful ways to change your environment and, as a result, your inner state. From there, anything that follows is from a shifted perspective. The morning time is a perfect example because you wake up to a vulnerable state connected to the emotion and belief energy you have been stewing in all night. Changing your outer state removes you from this impressionable place and provides a change of scenery for your brain, inside and out. Think of how a movie portrays a story not just by the dialogue, but by the landscape and the music. Change the environment for your story and watch the story of who you are change. Other examples throughout a given day include, a cold shower, a breathwork exercise, or getting up from your computer where you’ve been entrenched for hours to take a walk. When you take a walk, the scenery has suddenly changed and you are now amidst the powerful energy of the trees and the birds. Your brain is not just perceiving different imagery, but responding to different energy in the environment. With new landscape comes new awareness. You may notice that alongside some fatigue or twinges in your back you now have space to see that your thoughts are racing or your body is shaky with nervous energy. As the observer in these moments, these clues point you in the direction of emotion energy beyond the physical sensations. Once you make the choice to change your environment, you set the intention to learn of and be with the emotion and belief energy itself rather than relating to the physical sensations as anything other than a communication.

When you attempt to think your way out of a mind body experience, the thinking is likely fear-based and stressful or it is limited in its awareness beyond your learned brain pathways. As a fish in a fishbowl, it is hard to see outside the glass. As your landscape expands, so does your awareness, and with expanded awareness it is easier to find conviction in the truth of your experience: you are an energetic being, your body is safe, and you can change your state. From this perspective, you can choose to re-engage with the thinking mind if it serves you. However, I would encourage you to let go of the need to figure out exactly why your mind body experience is showing up and to simply know that it is. Therefore, your only job requirement is to see it for what it is - emotion and belief energy manifested - and to create space to be with this energy in a safer way. Trust that this energy will reveal itself over time if necessary or it will just release as it needs to. Each time you expose your brain to this process, the fear based associations will shrink while your deeper awareness grows with conviction. You will grow more confident that you are not sick or disabled nor do you need some complex, analytical solution. All you need to know is that you have the power within you to change your state and your mind body experience will follow.

Honor Your Hidden Parts

The mind body experience communicates loud and clear: when dis-ease is present, there are parts of who you are that are not being honored. I invite you to distinguish between what you are experiencing and the truth of who you are. Your experience is pointing you to your truth, where it is being missed, and the blockages in your way. Like any path or pursuit, the first thing you encounter are the blockages. For example, if you want to build muscle by strength training, the first thing you will encounter are the areas you are limited in. If you choose to avoid these areas and simply start lifting heavy weights, you are going to get injured and those limitations will let you know loud and clear that they are meant to be respected. Within your mind body experience, you may be honoring parts of you that represent areas of comfort or social acceptance, while disavowing parts that seem less attractive or more uncomfortable to acknowledge. This is not so dissimilar from those who may overlook stretching or nutrition when they start to train because they are less rewarding at first and may not seem to contribute right away to looking good in the mirror.

If you apply this idea to your personality, you may have grown up in an environment that honored more traditionally masculine or feminine parts, people pleasing and sacrificial parts, or strong and controlled parts of who you are, all the while explicitly punishing or subtly ignoring the parts that did not align with the expected presentation. You may have learned certain parts were associated with “weakness” and must therefore remain hidden. As a result, your brain learned quickly to associate these parts with danger and to protect against their emergence at all costs. One way to limit a part of you from being expressed is to layer it with feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and inadequacy, in addition to a host of beliefs about yourself centered around unworthiness. In other words, the disavowed parts are covered by a toxic stew of learned emotions and beliefs about yourself that you have been carrying for a long time as a form of protection, but that no longer serve you. The learned patterns of protection may at one point have taught you how to be more socially acceptable with teachers, friends, or within your own family, but their purpose was never designed to help you meet your truth. Underneath the learned emotions and beliefs that helped you survive childhood, there are vital parts of your truth yearning for love and attention. Like hardy plants that have managed to survive with little water or sunlight, your parts live on inside you, surviving the long winter of your social conditioning.

THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT.

These parts were never nurtured by your environment and your brain learned that they were not acceptable to see the light of day. Now, your mind body experience is pointing you there and you must listen in order to honor the whole truth of you are. The process of honoring these parts may come with fear, along with a host of other learned emotions and beliefs that have limited you up to this point. Recognize the emotions and beliefs for what they are: learned forms of protection your brain has used to quiet these parts, deemed unworthy, when they threatened to speak. Though uncomfortable, the emotion and belief energy represent an invitation to transform; they are the final bastions of an outdated defense system that must be broken through in order to reach new states of wholeness and integration. Use courage - all that you can muster - to see through the illusion of this learned messaging and show your brain these parts are no longer a threat. Only you will know what has been neglected, and it starts with listening to the smaller, quieter voices within you; the voices that have always been there but never had a chance to speak. These voices will grow louder as you clear a path through the learned patterns of protection and teach your brain that they are safe, worthy, and essential to honor the complete truth of who you are. You do not need to go digging for these parts, all you have to do is recognize the blockages in your way and create space to be with and move through them. Your suffering is not for naught, it is a beacon guiding you home. Always start with where you are and be gentle, your parts are waiting for you.

Release “Get” Energy

I am borrowing this phrase from one of my healers as she has guided me to remember that we are supported beyond measure in our manifestation of abundance, opportunity, and love. We do not come to these things from a places of desperation and lack unless we want to continuously live from a place of fear and perceived safety. At the subatomic level, love and money are both energies, and if we have unhealed parts of us related to these energies, whether they stem from our experiences or the lineages of our family, these unhealed parts will create blockages to our ability to receive them. We are conditioned by societal expectations to create success by taking from the world and from others. Look no further than the earth itself for a large scale example of how we plunder it for its resources. In many ways, Western society is founded on “get” energy - the perception that we must use others in order to get the things we desire or believe we need. I am not saying that some cannot create wealth or success from this place of “get.” Jeff Bezos and his well-known company represent the ethos of this “get” energy as he is now off to space to see what else he can get beyond the realm of earth. The earth itself is not enough to satisfy his “get” energy. When we live from this place, all the money in the world - literally - is not enough. We will never truly get enough to satisfy our perceived needs for safety and success when we live from this place. “Get” energy knows only the fear of not enough. Not enough money, not enough love, not enough anything. From this place, there is no fulfillment center large enough to fill us up.

When I reflect on my motivations for life, they have always stemmed from a place of lack. I never felt truly worthy of love or money, and for that reason I acted as though as I did not need either so as to protect myself from the disappointment of not receiving them. However, I still felt the need to meet the expectations of others, which led to turmoil within me as I rebelled against the people in my life while also desperately seeking their approval. The need to be liked or given the stamp of approval grinded against my judgment of this need in others. Both perspectives are different sides of the same “get” energy coin.

I thought I was not competitive as a young person because I became so swallowed up in fear of competition that I could not perform to my potential. Once I found ways to bring safety to my nervous system and developed more confidence in certain areas, I saw how deeply competitive I was. Contrary to what I believed at the time, competition is not an inherently evil thing nor is money. They are forms of energy and expression that depend wholly on the beliefs they stem from. I carried beliefs of never enough and, therefore, always attempted to “get” or to choose not to play the game at all. I preferred not to compete or to cooperate with others and turned to drugs instead of people as a source to fill me up. However, no drugs or people can help win the battle waged in our mind from the belief of “not enough.” That conflict is up to us and the beliefs we carry.

For some, the place of “get” may work for a time and they may be quite effective at using others, using competition, using money, and using substances to fill them up. But truly the worst curse of all is for this to work because, unfortunately, it does not last. The system is inherently not built to last, like relying on a slot machine for steady income. In my case, I was blessed with the experience of it never really working to begin with, though I assure you I did not see it as a blessing at first. People never really responded to my “get” energy in the way that I hoped and I lamented not feeling as successful as my peers. I believe I was seen with credibility in certain areas in the eyes of others, but I was always left with a deep, insatiable need for more love, more approval, and more success in all the ways I defined them in the moment. My personal reality was pervaded by the view of being behind the curve of life. Only when I recognized sources of power, inspiration, joy, and freedom within me could I begin to show up for myself and others. As I surrender to my own experiment of healing, others are naturally attracted to it if they themselves are ready to receive what I have to give.

As I leave the clinic where I shaped my identity as a clinical psychologist and all the perceived safety that came along with that path, I leave behind the labels and identities that no longer serve me, along with the fears and doubts of how I will get clients and get wealth and get recognition. When I expand my awareness to the possibility that I already have what I need, that I am already fully supported, that I am already exactly where I need to be on my path toward my highest intention and vision, my body physically relaxes. My mind stops plunging forward. All I need to do is receive the invitation to transform and move closer to my truth. This is my life’s work, my purpose, and my way of being of service. From that place, I am already abundant, already wealthy, and already loved. In fact, I have no choice to be anything but those things as I move in alignment with what is meant for me. That may sound a bit “woo woo” for some, but think for a moment of the times you have been led by fear to do something “productive” in order to “get” something. How did this feel? Did it work out the way you wanted? Did it satisfy you? Maybe you did grow your business or nail your presentation by channeling your Jeff Bezos energy, but I wonder if it ever truly felt like enough and I wonder if it carried forth ongoing or simply died off like a sugar high, requiring more mere hours later.

Thanks to the support of my own healers, I am committed to living from a place of already having what I need. From this place, I do not sacrifice or overextend myself simply to work with people or enter relationships that do not suit my highest intention or theirs. I give what I have to give for what it is worth and I simply invite those who are ready to receive it to transform. You heal only when you are ready to release the “get” energy and recognize the purpose within you. Only when you recognize that what lives inside of you is more than you could ever get from what lives outside of you can you manifest what is meant for you.

A Guide Through Sadness

Sadness and grief are primary emotions often present underneath a Mind Body Experience. You may notice more darkness, heaviness, and fatigue in the body and mind when sadness is present. The delicate dance you must do to be with sadness involves welcoming this learned part of you in, while also bolstering yourself enough to ride the wave without sinking into despair. Sadness has a way of pulling you down into the darker undercurrents of your experience. You must use the safe and powerful parts of your self -the dry land or life raft so to speak - to navigate these darker waters, to recognize and honor them, and to remain buoyant when being pulled into their wake. Associated imagery, emotional themes, or beliefs may emerge at times alongside this pervasive sinking experience. You may wake from sleep with the heaviness of burdensome dreams. You may recognize loneliness or inadequacy you have carried a long time. Welcome them in, grant them a seat at your table, just not at the head.

You may be surprised to find deep wells of sadness in many forms underneath or alongside the physical sensations of your Mind Body Experience. Notice how your brain reacts to such states, either with threat and danger or shame and punishment. The brain’s reaction is shaped by how sadness is perceived in the mind - your belief center - and what these beliefs say about you as a person for having sadness. Does sadness bring shame? Isolation? Confusion? How was sadness talked about, if at all, when you were growing up? The more your early life caregivers were threatened by sadness, the more your brain likely learned to protect against it. The first step to moving through an experience is to recognize your relationship to it. Notice if you immediately let the sadness define you and drag you down into thoughts about failure, weakness, or “not good enough.” The beliefs shape your relationship to the sadness and, therefore, manifest your Mind Body Experience. Remind yourself that this is a perfectly okay experience to be having and, in fact, is a necessary process to welcome all of your parts, the light and the dark, into your being.

But what does it mean to welcome in the sadness? It does not mean you must sink down into states of despair or wallow in painful memories, which only leads to being swallowed up by the Mind Body Experience and succumbing to hopelessness. Welcoming in means acknowledging the presence of these experiences while continuing with practices that create space for power and safety alongside it. You may sit for a brief meditation and breathing exercise while focusing on your heart and setting the intention to move through and release the feelings that no longer serve you. You may do some gentle stretching or movement to go beneath the thinking mind and physically move energy through the body. You may write about the experience as it unfolds, but the voice of the writer must be one of support not of despair. The goal is to be with the part of you showing up, while calling on the courageous, powerful, and safe parts of your awareness to bolster you. Think of the powerful and safe parts of you like a life jacket keeping you afloat as you wade into murky waters and honor what requires your attention.

You may write down your reactions to the experience of sadness, such as,

“The sadness makes me feel: loneliness, longing, hopeless, and scared.”

You may also write down the beliefs that show up, such as,

“The sadness makes me believe I am weak and cannot succeed.”

By doing this, you bring the beliefs and emotions about the sadness front and center to be confronted because these are the barriers in your way. But you must also set supportive intentions around these beliefs and emotions so as to recognize that these old patterns no longer dictate who you are as you move toward the light. In response to the beliefs and emotions showing up, you may write,

“I am expansive and powerful enough to be with these old beliefs about sadness, they no longer define me. I am safe enough to be with whatever shows up and release what no longer serves me.”

You dance with your sadness in an ebb and flow, never remaining static. Stuckness comes only from resistance to the process. With a life jacket in place, you will always be moving through, never stuck for too long. If hopeless or helpless energy shows up, summon courage - all that you can muster - and continue on with some of these practices anyway. You can show yourself care and gentleness even when the belief and emotion energy feels like it’s sinking your body and mind. You are more powerful than you realize. There is no need to chase the fleeting images, emotional themes, or memories; no need to “figure out” your sadness. All you must do is ride it like a wave as it carries you to shore.

Say “Yes”

Most of my life I said, “No.” I said, “No,” to my parents, to my teachers, to my coaches.. most authority figures in general. I said, “No,” to certain clothing, “No” to school, and “No” to life. I was not too cool for these things, I was just terrified and having a near constant inner experience of fear I could not explain. Saying “No” was my brain’s protection against the world, yet the perceived danger was within. My mind manifested an abundant fantasy life to represent freedom from the chains of my environment and the structures I felt trapped within. But the most powerful chains were the ones I carried with me. The limiting beliefs, intense emotion states, and negative thought patterns that dominated my life were what I said “Yes” to. This was all I knew, and though a deeper part of me knew the truth - that these aspects of my experience were not me - I could not help but be led by them.

My family wanted to support me and ease my suffering, but they did not have the tools to bring safety to my experience. My mother would often sit with me through tantrums or crippling stomach aches offering the power of her presence, which was important, but their resources were limited beyond their compassion. I would overdose on sugar and other foods that provided temporary relief, but it only contributed to the sickness and pain. Later in life, I began to say “Yes” to drugs that could produce the sense of freedom I desired. The drugs opened a door, but quickly pulled it shut as dependency on these external sources could only bring me so far before crashing me deeper into feelings of despair, anxiety, and isolation.

I said, “No,” to any opportunity to be with or move through the fear. My father introduced me to Buddhist philosophy and meditation at an early age, but this was not yet accessible to my disorganized and dysregulated nervous system. Attempting to sit in stillness led to an onslaught of thoughts and physical discomfort I was not prepared to be with. Only when my body forcibly pulled me into the deepest states of sickness and fatigue was I desperate enough to begin saying “No” to the external sources of escape I had relied on. I said “Yes” to things like exercise, cleaner foods, writing, and breathwork. Yet, the powerful belief energy of “not enough” pervaded my view. Even as I did objectively good things for my body and mind, I could not seem to access or escape the generator - the energy source - of my limiting beliefs. On a deeper level, I still needed to say, “Yes,” to my truth as a healer and to the path of healing.

I said, “Yes,” to therapy and to a career as a clinical psychologist. As I navigated the world of psychology, what was first a system of healing soon became a system of trapping that could not meet all my needs. My supervisors and peers put psychological knowledge on a pedestal, which limited my ability to seek outside its walls. While I continued to learn and grow in one area, my soul was unable to align with the more spiritual aspects of my journey. Within the Western psychology paradigm, I said, “No,” to alternative healing opportunities and saw them as fool’s gold compared to the more accepted path of diagnostic treatment. I had reached another plateau in my healing and considered that further inspiration, joy, and freedom might be reserved only for the privileged few to be born with such qualities.

At a point of desperation, I said, “Yes,” to the energy healers my mother was attracting, including clairvoyants, mediums, intuitives, and shamans. I discovered intuitive and body-based therapies that received guidance directly from my nervous system. I was skeptical, but I began having visceral, energetic experiences in my body. I began to recognize that the sensitivities I grew up with were not just sources of great pain but of great power. Though I had learned much about how to regulate my emotional experiences, I had not yet recognized the true purpose and potential of my sensitive and intuitive being until I opened these spiritual doors. As I began to see more ebb and flow in my Mind Body Experience, I gained more conviction that I could heal. I inched closer and closer to saying “Yes” to the truth of my purpose - to push beyond the boundaries of traditional healing systems and chart my own path. Once I said, “Yes,” to the fears, they were no longer fears but invitations to transform.

I continue to receive invitations to transform and I dance with them now. They no longer make me suffer as they once did because they no longer dictate my experience, they merely invite me to grow. If pain or fatigue sensations emerge, I know they are a manifestation of old beliefs and emotions in my nervous system showing up to be upgraded and released. With each invitation to upgrade, I move closer to my truth and I experience immense gratitude, joy, and inspiration as a result. When I say, “Yes,” to life, life is no longer a problem I solve, but a song I dance to. With each “Yes” comes the opportunity to move through the limiting beliefs that created the “No” in the first place. You, too, can accept the invitation to transform. You only need courage - all that you can muster - to say “Yes” to what is rising up within you and to recognize the layers of your brain’s protections that no longer serve you. The chains you perceive in your environment are no match for the chains you have been carrying all along. Recognize that you are not just a brain and body, you are an energetic being with a purpose on this planet. You are a great manifester and your soul is crying out for you to begin manifesting the life you were meant to live. The suffering you experience is the communication that the structures you remain trapped within, the expectations others have of you, and the lifestyle choices you make have not supported your highest vision or intention for this life. Say “Yes” to the potential within you and watch the world say “Yes” in return.

Moving Through Mind Body Blockages

Moving through the Mind Body Experience does not require effort, it just requires courage. You must become a dancer, moving flexibly to the rhythm of your experience. Over time, you become familiar with the signals, the ebb and flow, of your mind body experiences. There will always be times when your brain latches on to fear and doubt at the emergence of a new symptom experience, but this simply provides another opportunity to move through the fear and transform. Your brain will continue to throw you curveballs that test the limits of what you think you understand about your Mind Body Experience. With courage and conviction, you must continue to remain grounded in your power even while the undertow of the wave pulls you in. Your brain may produce pain, fatigue, and sickness in all of its varieties and flavors, but you remain committed to your path. Remind yourself that your body is rising to meet the truth of who you are. You are expansive enough to contain this and to move through it. Do not let the fear lead. See the fear for what it is: outdated patterns of protection in need of an upgrade. If you allow yourself to settle into the wave rather than thrashing against it, it will become clear what is taking place in the context of your life that is producing such an event.

To settle does not mean to be swallowed up by pain and fear. It means to flow when the experience flows and ebb when it ebbs. The same tools apply to reading these words. I know my language is paradoxical because words can only be a guide, so do not attempt to hang onto my words as absolute truth. Let them simply wash over you and allow yourself to be guided into a deeper experience of safety in this moment without needing to figure it all out. You are dancing with the words, dancing with the truth, dancing with your experience. Your action will come from trusting yourself to listen and doing what feels necessary in the moment. It takes practice and some guidance, but you are learning to be your own true healer. At times, you may need firmness to boost your mood, change your environment, and convince your brain that you can move through fear. Other times, you may need gentleness to be with the vulnerable parts of you showing up - the fearful, sad, or angry parts of your old self that are coming up to be released. Sometimes your Mind Body Experience may require no action at all and you may choose to ignore it and carry on with your day or close your eyes for a nap, knowing your true power cannot be stopped regardless of what action you take because there is nothing wrong with you. You do not always need to fight nor do you always need to accept. There is no universal model. It is a practice, an experiment, a dance.

The fear patterns and physical sensations will continue to show up to knock you off balance and bring you down to the familiar stuckness you have lived with for so long. Your brain cannot yet see the transformation taking place, but with courage - all that you can muster - you will expose it to the truth of who you are. Change your mind, change your body. If your mind is the belief center, your brain is the control center. It sends signals to the body based on familiar, learned patterns of response. If you have lived your whole life in fear, disappointment, shame, guilt, and avoidance, this is what your brain knows. This is how it has learned to protect you. Your suffering is not your fault and it never was. You did not come into this world as a blank slate, you came in carrying the unresolved conflicts of those who came before you. You carry these emotional conflicts with you and they manifest in your Mind Body Experience. But now it is your responsibility - your opportunity - to heal, and you have the power to transform.

Intuition - Learning to Trust

When I was young, my fearfulness took many forms, including that of intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. One of the core issues my thoughts and behaviors were attempting to solve was the fear of what was going to happen to me. I had no trust in myself or others to assuage the fears so my brain relied on superstitious acts to answer such terrifying unknowns. This was the best way my brain knew to survive the fear. As I got older, I learned different ways of coping with fear, but not until I began the process of trusting myself could I learn how to be with and move through the fear.

Early life experiences and the transmission of unresolved conflicts from our caregivers often get in the way and create blockages to trust that carry through adulthood. Children may be expected to trust others, but rarely are they allowed to trust themselves. Rather than learn to align with the truth of their being, children learn to follow the law, order, and manners of society, which is a manifestation of the collective need for control. Most cultures do not honor the natural intelligence of children and it is up to them - you - to journey inward and reconnect with the source of their innate wisdom: intuition.

Intuition is a word that often results in scoffs, eye rolls, or general confusion from those not open to ways of knowing outside traditional Western medicine, or those with no sense of meaning beyond what their eyes can see. However, those same individuals may not roll their eyes at the notion of trust. Intuition is the process of learning to trust your self. Not your thinking mind, not your learned emotion states, and not your shaped beliefs, but a source of knowing you were born with that knows the truth of who you are and never betrays you. Intuition is the source of your highest intention for life - your purpose - and due to a myriad of life experiences, stuck emotions, and beliefs about yourself, you may be cut off from what it is you really want out of life. You may heavily doubt this source exists at all. But where do ideas come from? Where does creativity come from? Is it just a random firing of neurons in the brain that produces brilliance and beauty by sheer accident? Is it just a collection of thoughts absorbed from others? I think not. You have a source of intelligence that cannot be defined by the thoughts racing through your mind or the neurons firing in your brain. It is a deeper source that can be cultivated with practice until you are able to stand with clarity and conviction in your truth.

After years of not being listened to, my intuition was covered over with layers of doubt, guilt, blame, and shame, but I began to exercise and restore it like a muscle. The mistrust that covered up this deeper source of knowing was the same mistrust that maintained my chronic suffering. The healing process stems from learning to trust that you are not broken and, in fact, you never were. You are an energetic being with a source of truth and knowledge beyond what you think you have learned in this life. So begin to honor this part of you by asking your self questions, waiting for an answer, and going with it as I did and continue to do. Being to surrender to this process. It will feel uncomfortable at first, and doubt and frustration will show up, but do not despair. This undernourished part of you has been waiting to guide you all along. So keep going, keep asking, and keep watering your intuition until it grows bright like the sun.

Love

Love is the most talked about, written about, sung about, televised, and advertised concept in history… and yet, it remains the biggest mystery to so many. It is true that love is about relationship, but what gets lost in translation is that it is about your relationship with you. The chronicity of pain is the communication of learned danger signals, but it is also the communication of a distorted love relationship with yourself. You may be a people pleaser, sacrificing yourself at every opportunity to maintain the love of others, or you may be hardened and withdrawn, closing yourself off to the opportunities others present out of fear of disappointment or abandonment. Your early life experiences, and those of your parents which you inherit, are not your fault. However, you have the opportunity to restore the relationship of love with yourself. If that sounds corny, please know that this is not an advertisement, love song, or dramatic movie. You may have many friends and many lovers, but this says little about your friendship and romance with yourself. You may have a solid partnership of many years, but how solid is the partnership with yourself. You may know those close to you intimately and share openly amongst them, but how intimately do you know yourself? How open do you allow your own body and mind to speak without fear of retribution or punishment?

Love is becoming aligned with who you are in the deepest way. Loving yourself is honoring the truth of your expression emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It is opening up walled off spaces inside you and clearing cobwebs of fear and shame. Love allows you to see that you are light and dark, as are we all.

Please know this is not a message of urgency to go “find” love. It is a message of awakening to the fact that it is there for you and always has been, untainted and unharmed, waiting to be unleashed onto the world. If you cannot access it in this moment, or all the moments leading up to this one, do not despair. It is there for you still and you will get there in time. For now, just be with what shows up. Love brings up all kinds of fear - the fear of being damaged or unworthy, of being disappointed or abandoned, of being controlled or swallowed up. The journey to love brings up every distorted belief and negative emotion about the possibility of losing it. But if you discover that the source of love lives within you, you will realize it can never be lost. Only found. Only remembered.

A Guide Through Fear

Fear lies at the root of much of your mind body experience. This may show up in any number of ways and will always be specific to you. For me, it often shows up as the sensation of having a tantrum on the inside. I used to have severe tantrums as a child, rolling around on the floor screaming and crying, dysregulated, helpless, and in extreme discomfort. This was my nervous system’s way of crying out for help when overwhelmed and riddled with fear. Those experiences stayed with my body, and when fear emerges, I can feel this experience re-emerging along with it. I can literally see an image of this distressed version of myself show up in my chest. Mind body experiences show up to communicate that this is a fear from long ago and that it needs attending to. The symptoms themselves do not matter. They are permeable, merely pointing to something deeper for you to be with. You must guide your attention to the fear and address it directly. Just like you would speak to a child in distress, you listen to this fearful part of you and create space for it, but you remain in charge. You set boundaries and you create a safe environment to move alongside it.

Each time fear shows up, your own version of my tantrum will show up too. The fear may show up in any number of mind body experiences that may make you question whether this is really fear or something else. But if you create space and pay close attention, you will begin to recognize a more familiar and raw fearfulness that has been with you much longer than the mind body signals. You must do what you can with courage – all that you can muster – to breathe into this part, to attend to it with care, and to move alongside it with firmness so as to ultimately create space for its release.  

I am a visceral person so my action often involves some movement. The movement is not about intensity or force, it is about creating space within. I am loosening up mind body protections and allowing the deeper fear entities to emerge. I am showing my brain and body a new experience with firm intention, with safety, and with power. Once you make a commitment to this action, you may notice other emotions show up too. You may feel tears or a scream rising up for release. Give it voice. Your brain will likely perceive this as threatening, but do your best to remind yourself that this is safe. In fact, it is magical. It is an opportunity presenting itself for you to transform. It is literally energy moving through you, and the stronger it is, the more potential it has to bring you into new states of joy and freedom.

Your Power Is Waiting For You

Power is not something you must gain. It is not something that just exists out in the world for you to discover. You are born with power. It is an essential and inherent part of your being. The journey to power is not one of creation, but of remembering. If you do not feel powerful, it is not because the power does not exist, but because a part of you, conscious or not, is choosing to give it away. You may be giving it away to your family, to your friends, to the people you work with, to the people you take care of, or to the people who take care of you. You may give it away to those who judge you or to those whom you judge, to those who give unsolicited advice or to those who believe they know what is best. You may give power away to the media or to anonymous people on the internet. And if you have made it to this site, you are likely giving power to your Mind Body Experience, whether that be your pain symptoms, your thoughts, or your emotions. You may hand it out freely to any negative sensation or experience at all. There is no shortage of things you can give power, and to become aware of this is to remember that your power is yours to keep. By remembering this and by making the choice to take it back, you restore the driving force of your highest intention - to become the truth of who you are.

This does not mean you have to get aggressive or force your way through the world with intensity. It means you can set boundaries and you can choose to lead instead of letting others or other experiences lead for you. First you must believe that you do, in fact, have the power to live the life you want and to move toward that life. Your Mind Body Experience is a communication that you have been giving away your power for too long. Once you find your conviction, it does not matter what symptoms show up, it does not matter what other people say, nothing can stop you.

You may, like me, have had early life experiences that challenged your power and covered it with layers of shame and fear. Children are often forced to give away their power to parents, teachers, strangers, etc. They are not taught to recognize their power, but to control it. Control your emotions. Control your behavior. Control your self. You must learn, as I did, that systems will continue to control your power until you make the decision to take it back. As I stepped into my power, I often received the image of an enormous figure with limbs made of tree trunks. This figure was me. And as I rose up to feel the full weight of my power, I fantasized of my enormous tree trunk legs crushing innocent, microscopic people and cars and other things in my way. The path to one’s power is rarely pretty - in fact it is dam messy - and you may upset some people who have comfortably related to you in your learned disempowered state. However, my monster fantasy was a manifestation of my fear that by taking my power I was somehow monstrous and destructive. This is far from the truth. The truth is that the greatest gift you can give to the world is to take back your power. The more you breathe life into your highest intention and move toward it, the more people will come to see you for who you were meant to be. You are a great manifester, but first you must come to find that truth within yourself. Your power is not dangerous, it is not burdensome, it is not bad. It is precious and it is waiting for you.

Your Experience, Your Truth

A lot has been said throughout history about the Mind Body Experience. Many talented healers, researchers, mental and medical health practitioners, and spiritual teachers have put their unique touches on the now well-worn, but still heavily doubted experience . With each day, new cutting edge research showcases the truth of non-structural origins of pain, fatigue, and sickness symptoms. However, rarely has it been the case that a sufferer is able to fully take in this information and move through their experience. Sure, every so often there is the person who can pick up a book by Dr. John Sarno or many others, learn about the connection between mind and body, and say, “Oh yea, that makes sense,” and move through their mind body experience with conviction and ease. For you, a well-written book or accessible podcast may have opened your eyes to the possibility that your mind body experience is not a chronic, structural, or medical issue, but it may not have transformed your life in the way you are hoping for, and you likely continue to experience debilitating doubts about the true nature of the opportunity presenting itself.

This is because you have a truth that is true only for you and it must be discovered by you. Yes, research has granted us access to some universal principles about the Mind Body Experience, such as the nature of physical or emotional trauma in the body passed down over generations, the learned neural pathways in the brain in response to stressors, and the nervous system’s vigilant scanning for perceived threat or danger. However, the way that your particular mind is shaped requires an access code based on an experience all your own in order to realize your truth. You must come to see with your own eyes that you are not broken and do not need to be fixed. The Mind Body Experience performs very successfully in hiding the true nature of your suffering. It draws your attention to all sorts of body sensations, which are then colluded with by the traditional medical system to send you on searches far outside yourself. It takes the willingness and courage - all that you can muster - to chart your own path of discovery in order to access the lockbox of your mind and begin to understand your self, not from the perspective of others no matter how good their intentions may be, but from a deep place within you.

We all need guides on this path, I certainly did, but the guides, whether they be therapists or doctors or shamans (I have met with them all), can only show you glimpses into the potential you possess. It will ultimately be up to you to find conviction that your experience can change. My father shared a story with me about his own search for spiritual freedom. On a retreat with a famous spiritual teacher, one fellow seeker asked why they should continue seeking if enlightenment came from acceptance of your experience.

The spiritual teacher responded, “Why would you stop seeking until you find what you are looking for?”

If you continue to have doubts, do not despair. The path to discovery is always open to you in each moment. The Mind Body Experience will continue to present itself as an opportunity to make space for your limiting beliefs, your emotional stuckness, and your doubts to be presented and transformed. It may not be a pleasant experience, but it is a vital and life changing one. For all of you out there who have not yet found healing from the numerous books and media you have digested, all preaching the path of mind body medicine, you must be willing to learn from your own experience and to discover your own truth as it relates to these ideas. You will inevitably have doubts, lots of them in fact, but keep going. Do not stop seeking until you find what you are looking for.

Courage - All That You Can Muster

Your courage is limitless, but you must remind yourself of this in every moment. The learned pattern of fearfulness will always rise to the occasion to dismantle your plans, your power, and your vision. You must summon courage - all that you can muster - to rise to the need of the moment. You are like an ocean, waves rise up and crash, but no single wave defines the sea. Similarly, no single wave of fear defines your journey, charts your path, or creates your identity. So when those waves show up, summon the courage of the deepest depths within you to show that wave that there is an ocean of courage ready to meet it, to be with it, and eventually, to release it. You may get “sick” (get it?) of this process as it happens over and over and over. But the ocean never tires of the waves rising and crashing within it. It is powerful enough to be with each and every one. And so are you.

Each day that you rise is a new day to meet the opportunity arising within you. Be with it. Do not let it lead, but make space for it to make its waves and release. My mother once shared a quote with me that has stuck with me: “Do not fear using up all your courage, you get a refill the next day.”

Waves of fear may show up at any time, night or day, but do recognize that they are just waves. There is an ebb and flow. They are not static or stuck and they move through you if you create the space for them to do so. So ride the wave. When you recognize its emergence, manifest your courage - all that you can muster - from the depths of your being. Feel it build up inside and bolster you as you ride that wave like the best body surfer in the world. Your courage will carry you through, it will not let you sink. You are as powerful and expansive as the ocean. You cannot be destroyed. You cannot be destroyed.