Awareness

So we’re talking about how to change, especially how to heal. Healing is more than just getting symptoms to go away. Symptom resolution is an important consequence of healing, and certainly something that we want to accomplish for ourselves, but is not the whole picture. And, surprisingly, there are many stories of people who experienced amazing healing when getting symptoms to go away wasn’t even their focus. (http://ahha.org/articles.asp?Id=55). I highly recommend you read Evy’s story, she’s a nurse-turned-minister who healed herself from a here-to-fore 100% fatal illness and has deep insights into her process.) I’ve been thinking about these concepts for decades and helping people with their healing has been my life’s work. As much as I’d like to have all of the answers, I must admit at this point that I believe that, ultimately, healing is a mystery. I can talk about how a person changes during the healing process or what a person is like after healing has happened, but how that process actually happens and how to get it to happen to you when you want it to…that part seems to be the mystery.

There are things we can do to set the stage or bait the trap, so to speak, but whether or not healing steps onto the stage or into the trap does not seem to be up to us. At the same time, I also believe that healing is always possible…for anyone…at any moment. And you can heal your whole life and still die. Dying is not an “F” on your Spiritual report card. After all, how many of us are getting out of here alive?

More importantly, what did your soul come here to experience? How can you live from your soul’s guidance? What is stopping you? Does your soul make mistakes?

Most of us seem to have a smoke screen, house of mirrors, game of hide-and-seek or some other perception blocking or altering process going on between our conscious knowing and our souls’ knowing. The process of healing seems to clear that path. The process of healing seems to open a line of communication between a person’s conscious mind and their deep inner source of love and knowing. They then have that loving and knowing to inform their thoughts, words and choices.

Imagine having that resource to help you live your life. You do, it is inside of you already. It does not have to be created: it just has to be contacted. Which is not as hard as you think: whether you know it or not, it is already talking to you all day (and night) long. To strengthen your connection to your soul, all you have to do is pay attention to your life.

You do that through awareness. After Faith, Awareness is the second step in bringing on changes that heal. For some reason, it is easier for us to work on an issue if we know it is there. And then if we ever want to be free of a particular malady, block or problem, we must work with the truth of it. Remember, the adage is not “you shall know your fantasy and your fantasy shall set you free”. Which is too bad: fantasies are so much easier. If you want to heal, use your power of awareness to become aware of your own truth, your own raw, naked, unadulterated truth. How are you feeling? What are you thinking? What do you believe? What is underneath the patterns in your life? What motivates your behavior? Have you made some assumptions you’re not aware of? What do you have control over in your life? Keep peeling back the layers to get to the root of your truth. Once you get there, how does your truth look to you from your soul’s perspective?

Awareness gets better with practice. Become aware of your surroundings and the people in your life but just as importantly, become aware of your inner workings, of your world view. How does your current world view compare to higher Spiritual truths? We all have our own rack of lenses in our psyche through which we are peering out at the world. These lenses determine how our life looks to us, how we experience what happens to us. In psychology, we refer to these lenses as your “structure of interpretation”. We each have our own unique structure of interpretation made up of many things such as all of the conclusions we’ve ever drawn from our past experiences, cultural influences, family patterns, genetics and such.

At the same time, there is a higher truth. Wherever your own structure of interpretation does not line up or resonate with the higher truth, symptoms will develop. The purpose of the symptom is to get you to explore your structure of interpretation and get it aligned with higher truth. I see this in my patients as they heal. The more a person’s own structure of interpretation resembles higher truth, the healthier they get.

Pay attention to your symptoms. Doggedly follow them back to their roots and open to the truth that is to be found there. View your present personal truth through Spirit eyes. Often, that is all that is required to get your old limiting beliefs to shift into alignment with higher truths. Be kind to yourself in the process, you deserve that.

Recently I’ve been working with a young woman whose primary problem is a tight knot in her left trapezius (upper shoulder and neck area). It keeps pulling her neck and ribs out and her left shoulder up and feels like a continuous Charlie-horse in her neck. She’s seen chiropractors and physiatrists who can get the knot to go away temporarily but it keeps coming back if she does anything at all physical. She had a very difficult childhood and has survived by using her prodigious left-brain intellect. The first few cranial sessions we did, whenever I asked her to listen to her body, she could feel the physical pain, spasm and twisting but when I asked her what emotions were associated with the pain, she drew a blank. All the while I was getting the sense from her body that she was just about ready to explode in frustration.

Physical feelings and emotional feelings are just correlates of each other. Every physical feeling has an associated emotion and every emotion has a physical representation in your body. If you cannot get information on both the physical and emotional tract, something in you is blocked. Use your awareness to find the block. (We’ll go over what to do about the block once you find it in later posts.) During her third or fourth treatment (I like to give people a chance to make their own discoveries before I get more directive and interventional) we discussed the possibility of a block and she was able to admit her frustration.

Then she was silent for a moment and said “My outlook on life has gotten really negative over the past five years.” She could see that chronic job stress and how she’d been treated by her team had caused the change. She was able to see how the negative attitude was affecting her. She had been aiming that negativity at herself as well. With more careful listening, she heard that the knot wanted her to start treating herself with honor and respect. This is one of those higher Spiritual truths: no matter how anyone else treats you, whether your parents, friends or co-workers, you are always worthy of honor and respect. No one else on the planet gets to define your self-worth. That’s between you and your Soul.

As so often happens in people’s lives, several issues are coming to a head for her at once. She’s working on a career change, moving and selling her condo, dealing with a lemon car to name a few. She is going to use this intense time in her life to re-awaken her positive attitude and practice honoring and respecting herself and letting that spread out like ripples through her life. She is making gains in her awareness. She’s learning to listen to her body not just on the physical level but also on the emotional and meaning levels as well. Instead of just being in pain, she’s getting meaningful information that she is using to improve her health as well as her work and personal life. At the end of that session, her neck and shoulder were completely relaxed and she knows that if the spasm returns, she can listen to it again.

So the steps we’ve covered so far to invite healing change into your life are:

1. Have faith that healing is possible, that you can find good solutions to your problems, that there is a good resolution to your suffering. You can do this.
2. Pay attention to your life and to yourself living your life. Trust what you see. Trust what you know. Get in touch with your wise, loving inner guidance. It will help you know how to have a healthy relationship with yourself and others. It will help you know what supplements, treatments and such are best for you. It knows what you ought to eat, how much and when. It knows how much and what kind of exercise to do. It knows what career is right for you. Listen and trust. Use your intelligence to figure out how to be happy.

There are more steps to the process that we’ll cover in the next couple of posts. Practice, practice, practice.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD