The First Step to Success is Believing in Yourself
This weekend, our local reservoir froze completely—something I haven’t seen in 20 years of living in Moab, Utah. The conditions were just right: no precipitation + super cold temperatures = glass ice. Perfect for skating and playing a little amateur hockey. That's my 6 year old son Bobby there in the front of the photo.
Skating for hours after not having skated for a year came with sore muscles and ankle pain. Minor afflictions are the perfect opportunity to practice healing your aches and pains with your attention, with your belief in yourself and your body's intelligence.
That's exactly what my son did and now he has that memory to draw from forever and build upon for life. Watching my son navigate pain reminded me why I teach what I do: the body is wise, self-healing starts with belief, and wholeness begins with trust. My little boy demonstrated this lesson this weekend perfectly.
Training
I'm a holistic health practitioner. I am thankful we have a stellar hospital and that conventional medicine is there when we really need it, but as a holistic practitioner, my first stop is not Tylenol or ibuprofen. It's not cough syrup, antibiotics or steroid cream. It's not hand sanitizer and disinfectant. In fact, my kids have never once had one antibiotic and they're 6 and 8 years old. Again, I'm glad they're there and I, in fact, wouldn't be here, at least not with both of my legs, if it weren't for antibiotics, so I'm thankful.
I just think we're all too eager to have a quick fix - with fast food - fast, industrialized, chemicalized food - with lab made chemical medicine, with anti-everything, with getting rid of feeling uncomfortable. As a result, we've fallen out of touch with our body's wisdom to come back into balance and heal itself, given the right conditions, both from nature, our ability to handle adversity, and our heart's capacity to feel.
Dr. Bruce Lipton, world renowned cell biologist and pioneer in epigenetics, explains so well how it's our environment that affects our cells and genes - whether that's an external environment outside of our bodies like environmental toxins or clean air and water or an internal environment inside of our bodies, like the chemistry produced from our thoughts, beliefs and emotions. You can read this fabulous read here with the National Library of Medicine.
My first go to with myself and my family is energy medicine and/or medicine grown in nature - homeopathy, herbs, food, time, oils, rest, hydrotherapy - coupled with the healing power of the breath and belief in one's ability to heal. All of these medicines build chi/energy/vital life force and stimulate the body's natural responses to come back into balance rather than suppress or repress symptoms just to be rid of them.
I train my kids that there's an intelligence within them that is loving them into life and if they can connect with that loving intelligence then their body will self-correct and re-organize itself back into order.
Step 1: Manage their intention. On the problem? Or on linking up with this intelligence? You got it, on shifting to connecting with this intelligence.
Step 2: Become aware of the breath.
Step 3: Allow the breath to join up with the heart.
Step 4: Get clear on what they need help with.
Step 5: Breathe in a feeling of trust, of worthiness, of a belief in themselves and their ability/capacity to heal.
Yes, sometimes I just give them a homeopathic remedy.
Yes, sometimes I just give them some vitamins.
Yes, sometimes I just give them food or water or snuggles or massage.
And sometimes I want to inspire them to remember that they don't always need something outside of themselves. That most times, they just need to work with their body and meet their pain or affliction with the love in their heart and the belief in themselves and the intelligence within them to come back into balance.
Luckily, this isn't just woo-woo or subjective. Dr. Joe Dispenza's team along with HeartMath® Institute Research has evidence to suggest that our greatest pharmacy is within us. SOURCE is a great documentary that you can check out to see and hear the latest scientific research on syncing up with this intelligence within through meditation - in other words, changing our inner environment.
Maybe the most useful prescription we could get from the doctor's office is belief, encouragement and instructions on how to connect with the part of ourselves that knows how to self-organize, heal, and come back online, back into coherence with our innate wholeness.
Execution
Training takes time, it takes patience and it takes commitment. Think of any athlete or craftsman or artist that wants to be better at what they do. When there's an execution (and it works!) then we get to celebrate and appreciate our efforts which further reinforces the belief in ourselves, in something greater than ourselves, in life itself.
Saturday we skated for half the day and that night, Bobby had a hurt ankle and foot. He came to my bed panic-y and upset that his foot hurt really, really, really bad (his words). I believed him. I also knew he was tired and everything is worse when we're stressed and/or when we're tired and what he really needed was sleep.
I saw this as one of those opportunities to help him understand that he doesn't always need something outside of himself to heal. So, I made sure I had a coherent heart when I told him so. Not a dismissive "just go to bed, you're fine" kind of thing, but rather a genuine, heart-felt, "I hear you buddy, that is so hard when we're in pain, isn't it? And I just know that your body knows what to do while you sleep and rest."
He went to his bed and I could hear him begin to cry. His emotions were escalating. I waited. I thought about getting up and giving him a remedy or comforting him, but I also knew his dad was lying next to him - a steady, stable and loving witness that could just be with him - and I believed it was going to be okay.
Celebration
The next morning I had forgotten about it, to be honest.
Bobby was sitting up at the counter while I was making breakfast and his monologue went something like this: "Mom, guess what. Last night when my foot was hurting so bad and I went back to my bed and I started crying because it was hurting so bad and when I was crying I had the idea to do heart-focused breathing and so I started to do it and I stopped crying and I didn't even have to put my hand on my heart, I just started breathing in and out of my heart slower and deeper like you taught me and then I don't remember anything because I guess I fell asleep but when I woke up, guess what, it doesn't hurt at all. I'm a fast healer."
A few thoughts went through my brain all at once. One being that I wished I had recorded him saying this because it was cute and inspirational. Close after that thought it hit me that the training, the teaching of heart-focused breathing every night, the conversations about the what and the why were paying off. The operative line in his monologue was "AND THEN I HAD THE IDEA TO DO HEART-FOCUSED BREATHING...."
Once you do something so many times, you begin to do it automatically. That's what a habit is. I had encouraged him so many times for that to be the solution, or at least the first step, to his problems - ailments, pains, belly aches, sibling injustices, being told no, being told yes, etc - that it had become his idea to access that choice rather than being coached to do so.
And he was able to enjoy the fruits of his labor all on his own.
And then he wanted to share his story.
I told him to never forget how powerful his ideas are.
Let it Be Simple
Heart-Focused Breathing™, HeartMath's foundational technique, is so simple that the mind doesn't even pay it any attention.
It just slips by our awareness. We dismiss it and never let it get past the brain stem and into our body because we judge it as too easy. But when we do it, sincerely, it can have a profound ripple effect in all areas of our life. It initiates physiological coherence in our body - where our brain, heart, and nervous system are in an energetic coordination, working in harmony, working in an order and a rhythm.
When our heart, brain and nervous system are interconnected and synchronized in this way, then we don't need the pain signals anymore because we have responded to the pain signals. We've heeded the message, we're paying attention, we're doing our part to come into alignment with our body's messages. WE'RE ON THE SAME TEAM and we're acting like it.
So, try it now.
HEART-FOCUSED BREATHING™ TECHNIQUE
Simply bring your attention, bring your focus to the area of the heart. Now, imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart, or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable.
That's it.
It's not an intellectual technique, it's a feeling technique.
Bobby has done it enough times now that he was connecting with the belief that he's a good healer because I tell him that all the time. I'm programming him to believe in himself and the intelligence within him and all around him.
Again, our genes respond to our environment.
It's never too late to deprogram the belief in lack and separation and to reprogram yourself with the belief in trust and wholeness.
It requires time spent teaching your body what that would feel like, what thoughts you would think as someone who believed in themself, what emotions you would experience, what actions you would take. And then faith and trust is your bridge from the old program to the new program, from the old habit of disbelief in self and life to the new habit of belief in self and in life.
It takes energy, it takes practice, it takes a genuine desire, it takes inspiration from real life stories, it takes willingness, it takes love.
Feel into that moment of accomplishment, the moment when you remembered you had everything already in you and let that feeling live in your heart, let that feeling be your inspiration to remember again and again and again.
Only always.
Future Medicine is the Original Medicine
A quick google search will show you the origins of the words medicine and healing.
The root word of the word "medicine" is the Latin word medicina, which comes from the verb root mederi meaning "to heal".
The root word of "heal" is haelan, which comes from the Old Saxon word hal or haelen. Hal means "whole" or "to become whole."
Perhaps prescribing a belief, a feeling, an opportunity, a meditation to connect with a feeling of wholeness, trusting that our nervous system knows how to re-organize, self-organize in a way that aligns with this intention, could be the prescription we could all use more of. After all, our system knows how to pump 2,000 gallons of blood a day, breathe 17,000 breaths a day, manage 50+ trillion cells, dilate our pupils when we enter a dark room, regulate our temperature, digest our food. We're not doing that, something else is doing that.
Connecting with this intelligence and working WITH it is medicine, is healing, is wholeness. The door, the bridge, the access point to this connection is the heart. All you have to do is breathe there, be there, stay there, live there, and the healing will join up with you.
Albert Einstein once said, “The future of medicine will be the medicine of frequencies.” If frequency is a measurement of energy, and emotions are energy in motion, then trust, belief, and love are the most powerful medicines of all - past, present and future.
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