Healing gets tricky.
Because our minds are tricky. You know, how they serve both survival and wisdom?
How they see just enough of a situation to instantaneously conjure the worst-case-scenario? Or lure us into seeing just what we want and expect to see?
While, at other times, amazing us with mind-blowing assessments of the deeper truth of things.
All in one mind!
And that’s what makes healing tricky—our minds can get in the way.
We have to reckon with our beliefs and stories about what’s possible.
Sometimes, as we all know, our perspectives are obstacles to growth and healing, stopping us dead in our tracks.
But our perspectives are not fixed. Without changing the facts, we can change how our minds understand them. (Right? We all know about the power of neuroplasticity—the biology of how our minds can change.)
We can shift our perspectives to unlock untapped potential—to heal.
Old hurtful stories are reborn into something new and shiny. Ennobling rather than disempowering. Taking the brakes off our healing.
Something like this:
Rather than having been a victim of that terrible thing, we’re the one who was challenged, became stronger, rose up high over adversity, and shook loose the false understanding that the terrible thing was about us.
Rather than having been abandoned, disadvantaged, or held back from our true potential, we became scrappy, bad-assed, and more skilled and richly nuanced than we would have been any other way.
Rather than having surrendered to dogma that left no room for hope, delivered by an “expert” who didn’t know us as we did, we walked away and claimed our power to believe in possibilities.
See that? It’s all in the way we look at things.
But we need help!
I’d like to share two powerful tools—perspective changers—that I use every day on my own tricky mind. These tools help me elevate everything.
Not changing the facts. No. I honor what’s happened. I honor how I feel. I honor my need to grieve the past and the present. I honor why my mind created stories that now no longer serve me.
Rather these are tools for close scrutiny of the stories we tell ourselves about our life experiences, allowing us to see and understand them in a more ennobling way. Transforming them into something that gives us power and potential… to heal.
The Lens of Love
Love changes everything. It changes our brains, changes our genetic expression, and changes our stories—through a foundational perspective shift, not by conjuring new facts.
Through the power of neuroplasticity to change our minds, love changes our futures and opens up possibilities for growth and healing that are impossible in love’s absence.
Use this lens to evaluate all of your life stories—especially the difficult ones: do I keep love as my boss, or do I sink to blame, shame, guilt, or hopelessness?
And for future stories: does this course of action serve love and connection, or does it serve fear?
These are the only questions you need answers to as you move forward on your life journey.
The Life School Point of View (POV)
This powerful perspective shifter reminds us that the events of our lives have been purposeful—if not necessary—for becoming exactly who we are today. The person we love and are satisfied with. Or the person who needs some work (but without the Life School POV would never realize this).
Not that those events were somehow preordained, but they are all available to us to derive meaning and foster strength and wisdom.
Even the traumatizing and painful stuff has shaped us into who we are today. They’ve led us to create resources to support us, to call in help and love that have amazed us when they arrived, and filled us with wisdom that has strengthened us for the rest of our lives.
The Life School POV doesn’t let us sink into the passive position of the victim to our circumstances. We make sense out of it—we learn, we grow, we rise.
These tools help us drop all blame and excuses—stories that are always soul, energy, and time sappers.
In the end, this life is ours, plain and simple. We claim full responsibility for all of it. There is no other path to sustainable healing.
Healing is all in how we look at things.
Haves a Beautiful day!
Karyn
p.s. Come take a journey with me. A healing journey. One that is empowering because it supports our innate potential to heal. It places the power to heal squarely in our own hands.
The book will launch in 2019 and I cannot wait! It finally has a title
HEAL
Claim Your Energy, Your Potential, Your Life
~a Roadmap for a Healing Life~
This book has been a labor of love. A roadmap inspired by the revolutionary science of Functional Medicine, the genius of body-mind integration, and the wisdom gleaned from Life School, as well as my work with thousands of clients—my true teachers—over my many years of practicing medicine.
In the meantime, I’m sharing chunks of the book’s contents in complementary e-books available through my website. Sign up here (both current and new subscribers).
p.p.s. And from my Archives:
Body First. 2018.
