Happy New Year (and a humble suggestion for a resolution)

As you are making your New Year’s resolutions, I would hazard a guess and say that what you want most this year is to be healthy.

You see, to me, being healthy means to be happy. It means to have enough affluence to be comfortable and reasonably free to pursue your dreams. It means having deep sustaining relationships and meaningful work in the world. It means feeling fulfilled, challenged, excited to live each day. It means having a fairly good grasp on how it is that you create so that you can create a life that is pleasing to your soul. It also means having your mind/body/energy working well enough to sustain you through it all.

And who wouldn’t want that?

Now you just have to answer the question, “How do I move from my present life to my ideal, healthy life?” That is what the Seven Tools of Healing are all about.

As you may imagine, there are several steps involved.

Your mind/body/energy needs certain things. Just as you need good food for your body, you also need sustenance for your mind and energy, such as high quality ideas to think about and good sources to replenish your energy. And, just as your body needs exercise, so does your mind and energy. They also need good rest. There are practices for all these things and your inner wisdom can help you choose which practices you need that also fit with your life.

Then you need to remove the factors that wear and tear you down and replace them with factors that build you up and sustain you. Again, your inner wisdom can help you figure out what those factors are and what to do about them. Practicing the Seven Tools of Healing puts you in contact with your inner wisdom.

Finally, for your ultimate healing, you need to go deeper still. Unless you want to continue spending all your time and energy chasing around trying to change what has already appeared in your life, you need to get ahead of it by figuring out how to take conscious control over the factors that determine what you are creating as your life.

This may sound a little esoteric, but it is the most important step in order to achieve real healing. At the same time, simple, reliable, and effective ways to change the determinants of your creative flow elude most self-help programs. The Seven Tools of Healing fills this gap. Practicing the Seven Tools is the best way I’ve found to find limiting beliefs and align them with higher truth. The more your personal truth aligns with higher truth, the healthier you get.

So, please, I ask you, put “Mastering the Seven Tools of Healing” high on your list of New Year’s Resolutions. Do this and I think you’ll find that most everything else on your list pretty much takes care of themselves.

The Seven Tools are really a set of skills that you can learn and hone with practice. Then, when you apply these skills to whatever is going on in your life, healing happens. See www.the7tools.com for resources to help you master the tools.

The Benefits of Listening

Learning how to listen to your own inner wisdom is the best skill anyone on a healing path can master. Case in point: recently, a patient I’ve been working with for years for her fibromyalgia has been going through a difficult time with insomnia. She falls asleep okay but then wakes up two hours later and cannot go back to sleep. She is very sensitive and often gets paradoxical reactions to both medications and supplements she takes. That means she often experiences the opposite to what the medication is intended to produce. For example, she tried trazedone, which was first developed as an antidepressant but was so sedating that no one could take the antidepressant dose without sleeping all day so we now often use a fraction of the antidepressant dose as a sleep aid. She took one dose and lay awake crying inconsolably all night. Antianxiety medications give her panic attacks and so forth. So we could find no medication or natural supplement that she could both tolerate and that was effective. She was nearing total melt-down after weeks of not sleeping.

For so many of my patients who get paradoxical reactions to medications, it is as if that is their body’s way of saying “Drugs are not your path to healing.” Most of them eventually find that consciousness is their path. My patient has been working hard on her issues with a therapist, making important changes in her life to take good care of herself, eating well, exercising; in other words, doing all the right things but all to no avail. One evening, in desperation, she was looking through her notes just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything when she came across a little yellow sticky note I’d given her at a recent visit. It read, “Cure and curiosity come from the same root word. Get curious about yourself, about your life and what is happening to you.” She told me later that she told herself, “I’m going to get curious about this insomnia. What’s at the root of it? What does it need?” Then she got still and the message “detox” came into her mind.

I would have not thought to recommend detoxing to her because she had already eliminated her reactive foods and her digestion was working pretty well. She sat in a sauna for 30 minutes, went home and slept for 9 hours straight. The next day she sweat for another 30 minutes and slept 8 hours that night. She said that she got the insight that her toxicity was actually her body’s response to her underlying chronic anxiety.

She has continued her listening and recently reported that she sees how she’s been trained from childhood to give her power away. Her inner wisdom has given her recommendations for what to do about that and recently, when her x-husband filed to sue her for increased child custody and child support because she makes more than he does, rather than get all stressed out about it like she would have, she, instead, turned around and filed her own suit against him for the six years of child support that he has not paid her. She is now inventorying her life and changing all the ways that she has been taken advantage of and given her power away. She is sleeping much better.