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Contents Dedication Author’s Note Acknowledgments Foreword by Jeffrey Bland, PhD, FACN, FACB Introduction to the Revised Edition Introduction Healing Visualization: What You Appreciate, Appreciates
CHAPTER 1: MODELS OF HEALTH AND HEALING Understanding the Allopathic Paradigm of Medicine
CHAPTER 2: FOUNDATIONS FOR HEALTH Nutrition CASE HISTORY: Alleviating Pre-Menstrual Symptoms Blood Sugar Stability and the Adrenal System CASE HISTORY: Eliminating Headaches by Stabilizing Blood Sugar CASE HISTORY: Using a Holistic Approach to Depression The Immune System CASE HISTORY: Reducing Candida and Heavy Metals Through Cleansing CASE HISTORY: Eliminating Asthma with Supplements CASE HISTORY: Addressing Eczema, ADD, and Allergies with a Healthy Diet CASE HISTORY: Improving Lung Function with Detoxing The Digestive System CASE HISTORY: Addressing Psoriasis Through Detoxing The Structural System CASE HISTORY: Addressing Chronic Back Pain with Chiropractic Therapy Toxicity CASE HISTORY: Avoiding Hip Replacement with a Healthy Diet
CHAPTER 3: LOVE YOUR BODY CASE HISTORY: Eliminating
Chronic Urinary Tract IrritationsThrough Detoxing Health and Healing Exercise
CHAPTER 4: FOUNDATIONS OF HEALING Healing Visualization Intention and Expectation Healing Visualization: Clarifying Your Intention to Heal The Mind, Beliefs, and Identities Healing Visualization: Commit to Being a Healing Presence Emotions
Healing Visualization: Healing Our Heart Observing Energy and Patterns CASE HISTORY: Using Mindfulness to Heal Unhealthy Patterns Healing Visualization: Releasing Energetic Patterns Trust Healing Visualization: Leaning into Trust Forgiveness and Compassion Healing Visualization: Connecting to Forgiveness and Compassion Healing Visualization: Compassion Connection Cooperation Community Communication Contribution Embracing Death Healing Visualization: Dying
Afterword Bibliography About the Author Love Notes from Graduates
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The two most important days of your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why. —Mark Twain
Introduction Growing up, I was sick all the time. I had strep throat with 103-104 degree temperatures three to four times a year, for four consecutive years. I spent what felt like months on penicillin and antibiotics, headaches plagued me almost daily and I popped aspirin like candy (which I also had a taste for). During my freshman year of college, I was actually hospitalized for internal bleeding from all the aspirin I took. My body and I were not friends. Then, in 1970 my college advisor introduced me to Dr. Louis Billotte who became one of the most influential people in my life. Dr. B, as many of his patients called him, was a miracle worker for the clients who came from all over the world to consult with him in his home just north of Boston. Receiving his M.D. in 1930 and his N.D. degree in 1932, he was one of those rare doctors who knew that the limits of extraordinary health and healing were well beyond what most people considered possible. As a young student I came to practically worship Dr. Billotte. He became my mentor and guide, and I had a standing appointment with him every Monday at 9:00 a.m., which I kept for years. In my first year of following his counsel, I took handfuls of vitamins, desiccated liver powder, cod liver oil, and nutritional yeast every day. He asked me to begin looking carefully at what I was eating, encouraging me to choose food that was grown organically and was minimally processed. I was also clocking nearly four hours of yoga daily and learning to make peace with my mind through meditation. The new good health I was experiencing under Dr. Billotte’s care was a revelation and became the focus of my life. In the second year of seeing Dr. Billotte, he asked me if I was ready for the next level. I trusted this man totally, and without hesitation began increasingly intensive periods of cleansing and detoxification. I fasted one day per week to rest my body. On Mondays, I drank only fresh vegetable juice and water. That lasted for a year, at which point Dr. B asked me to add two extra days of juice only in the fourth week of each month. In the third year, I added another two full weeks of cleansing at the end of each
quarter, around the equinox and solstice. Some of those longer cleanses lasted three to six weeks at a time. I felt incredible. By the time I went to naturopathic school, I was logging over 100 days of cleansing per year, and while I recognize that this was radical to some degree, it also gave me a treasure trove of experience to bring into my naturopathic medical school training. Over the past nearly 40 years of practicing medicine in New England, I have worked with thousands of patients, supporting them in creating optimal health and a life rooted in transformational healing. Many of my clients come to me fed up with conventional medicine. When they go to see their physicians, their questions often go unanswered, their interactions can be brusque and impersonal, and, in too many cases, they don’t get better. What I have found is that a fundamental understanding of what generates and sustains truly optimal health as well as what constitutes meaningful healing is absent, both in the mainstream medical establishment and in the public. Furthermore, doctors and patients often lack the ability to communicate with one another in a manner that empowers the healing process. This book is intended to help readers build a foundation of understanding from which optimal health and healing can naturally and continually flow into their lives. HEALTH and HEALING Health is a measure of complete physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Healing is the process of restoring physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wholeness. It is the experience of becoming connected to one’s most essential spiritual nature and personal wholeness. !
From a holistic point of view, optimal health is not simply the absence of disease symptoms. Rather, it is a sense of being energetic, vital, and intentional about certain practices that result in ideal organ function and synergy, which create an enjoyable physical experience. When you know how to optimize your vital life systems, you have choices about how to increase your energy and stamina, how to strengthen your immune system, how to balance your hormones, how to lose and maintain weight, how to deal with stress and the demands of work, family, and your responsibilities all within a context of greater connection, peace, and wholeness. Being sick and not feeling well is a challenge for a great many people. This book is especially for those who suffer from “vertical disease.” Vertical disease is when you are not sick enough to be in bed, but have resigned yourself to chronic asthma, allergies, low energy, or coffee dependence; indigestion, bloating and distention plague you daily;
your joints ache and arthritis is a constant distraction; you have recurrent headaches, continued susceptibility to infections, or your hormonal swings make certain times of the month seem out of control. If you are frustrated by your eating or other addictive patterns, if your weight is out of control and you are tired of dieting, this book will offer new tools and insights to help you get clear about the path forward. If you feel stressed, overwhelmed, tired, or your sex life is locked in the closet somewhere, this book is for you. And, if you are someone who gets sick often enough that you do have to be “horizontal,” forcing you to miss work or putting a strain on your intimate relationships, this book is especially for you. This book is laid out to provide a holistic understanding of the lifesustaining systems that support health and healing. It begins by looking at those individual physical systems within your body that maintain and contribute to optimal health. Then it looks at the context in which healing takes place and the different tools and practices you might consider using along your journey. When you finish reading this book, it is my intention that you will be excited about learning how to deepen your connection to healing and liv- ing from your empowered identity as someone who creates healing in your own life. While we will discuss a number of concrete areas that affect health— including nutrition, the adrenal system, and the immune system—we will also look at your relationship to healing and the role you play in bringing healing more intentionally into your life. At the heart of a truly transformative healing context is the development and practice of awareness. For some, awareness is developed through certain meditation and mindfulness practices, while for others it might be writing and reflecting on your physical and emotional experience. Becoming a dispassionate observer of your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual experiences—witnessing your experience without being swept up in any particular judgment or assessment—is vital to creating new possibilities for optimal health and healing in your life. As you read this book, it may also be useful to keep in mind some of the following questions, allowing them to percolate in your awareness and open up new ways of seeing things. • What is optimal health for me? • How do I encourage my health? • How do I impair or block my health? • What does healing mean to me? • Am I aware of how I heal? • How do I block healing in my life? • What would I need to more powerfully allow for healing in my life? As the sections conclude, I will offer a few visualization practices, which are intended to help the information integrate into your body in a more holistic way, not staying confined to the conceptual framework of
the mind. Hold these practices lightly and with curiosity, and accept the invitation to greater wellness and wellbeing as deeply as you can. Health and Healing Tip: What you Appreciate, Appreciates Find or purchase a journal that you can dedicate to your healing process and title it “Healing in My Life.� Over the course of the subsequent chapters, write your answers and reflections to these processes in this notebook and refer to them regularly to remind yourself of the insights and commitments that might arise. Sit quietly for a few minutes and allow yourself to relax. Allow your breath to flow freely and naturally. Think of an image in your life that you consider beautiful. This might be a flower, a place you have visited that inspires you, the face of someone you love, or a work of art. Take the beauty of this image into your mind and heart. Breathe it in. Stay with this picture in your mind for at least a full minute and allow this experience of beauty to reach every cell of your body. Now, on a clean sheet of paper in your journal write down everything you are grateful for about your physical body. Make a specific list of anything and everything you can acknowledge that works. How does your body help you experience this multidimensional world of colors, sounds, and sensations? Acknowledge how you depend on your body for the vast amount of what you experience in your life. Be specific. When you are finished, re-read what you have written about the aspects of your body that you can acknowledge with a bow of respect and gratitude.
Introduction to the Revised Edition We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them. —Albert Einstein How to stay sane in a chaotic time is a relevant frame of reference for me. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us to explore the nature of fundamental uncertainty which is at the core of life. No matter how ritualized our health habits are, there is still a mystery of life to embrace: we can either surrender and be empowered by the uncertainty, or we can resist and feel anxiety in having little control over our lives. For many decades the conversation about what promotes and what blocks healing has been at the core of my learning. The chapters in the original edition of this book included ideas and exercises that I have been practicing for years. In this revised edition, I have included new distinctions I've learned from thousands of clients and workshop participants which can also be ways of accessing healing energy. Now, more than ever, we are all called upon to create health. It is increasingly important that we bring forth the qualities of trust and other life-affirming values. At a time when there is more social unrest, more outrage, more incidences of human disrespect and betrayal, and more disparity in how marginalized people are treated, I believe we all are challenged to learn how to be more compassionate, more forgiving, and better communicators. My intention is that all these chapters on healing will empower us to reach thousands of our friends and neighbors, and thereby embody and entrain ourselves and others to the frequencies and energies associated with these qualities. This book alone—with all its healing ideas—is not enough to transform how we interact with ourselves and others; to cooperate, communicate, build communities, and live in a context of interconnection requires intention and constant practice. The exercises at the end of each chapter are one small step you can take to make the words personal, and then put those ideas into action in your life. I have been blessed, with my online Love Your Body workshops, to lead over 15,000 people through profound positive experiences. Since 1981, I have been guided to explore how to step fully and completely into the world of healing—not merely cognitively or intellectually. We need to look at our own actions concerning how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, and how we respect the earth. Our capacity to heal ourselves and others is far greater than our intellect and our thinking can embrace. I am grateful for your courage and persistence in taking a stand to be one of those people who brings more Light into the world. More Light usually reveals more darkness, and that darkness can then be transformed by the Light of Love. May we all know the value of community, friends, and family to steady our course when it is so easy to abandon our mission or feel overwhelmed and revert to normalcy. n Albert Einstein knew that while spontaneous healing can occur at any moment for anyone, intentional healing requires an entire paradigm shift. My purpose in writing about healing is to increase the awareness that our capacity for healing is infinitely greater than we were brought up to believe.
Learning more distinctions about the nature of healing can support us in creating a different context for our life, if we choose. Healing is not formulaic. Healing is more holographic: any one of the models I have offered in this book can elicit more energy for healing. With intention, you will access frequencies that you can identify as healing experiences. Trust, forgiveness, compassion, honoring all emotions including loss and death, releasing and reprogramming negative conditioned patterns, forgiveness, communication, cooperation, contribution, the multi-dimensional qualities of connection, and a sense of belonging to communities are each cornerstones that can support our journey of engaging with the wondrous nature of healing. Each of the above distinctions of healing challenge us to learn different skill sets in order to make a difference in our lives. Imagine what your life would be like if you were masterful in more of them. These conversations do not live in a hierarchy. Depending on any given moment in your life and the lesson that is waiting there for you to learn, any of these exercises—alone or in combination with other aspects of healing—can bring you to greater peace, love and clarity. The qualities of creativity, courage, curiosity, and contentment can be landmarks that show you are on track to learning what your life purpose is. When you are committed to living a life oriented towards being a messenger for healing, you become more and more the personification of healing for the planet. As you trust the process of healing, you come to realize that healing is never just about you. Because of life's interconnectedness, when you heal a personal issue, there is a ripple effect for the evolution of all people. Being a stand for others around you to heal as you heal creates a powerful web of interconnected energy—even though you may often fall down, like a child just learning to walk. When our life is dedicated to more deeply honoring the many aspects of healing, we sometimes fail in ways that can look and feel awful. These failures or breakdowns can be interpreted as the "wake-up calls" that show us where we need to be more aware and more resolved in being a healing presence. This might mean that many times we may look like a bigger fool than someone who lives with fervor to remain unconscious. Many unconscious people keep themselves busy with over-scheduled lives filled to the brim with distractions. They may not have space to look at themselves due to body issues, radical eating patterns that include or exclude certain foods, or addictions that preoccupy and overwhelm them. We all have coping strategies that help us manage unresolved issues, and these keep us unconscious. Enlightenment is not a permanent experience, and no one is immune to being deeply asleep or unconscious at times. It is not about seeking the love you are yearning for; it is becoming aware of all the barriers you put in the way of your self. —Rumi
Healing is a journey—not an end goal. The key is being aware of how we speak when we wake up from our trance, and how we take responsibility for our actions and words while we were in "forgetting mode." It takes courage to recommit to love and trust, and to have confidence that we do not have to keep repeating our lessons. I offer you these words with the intention that you take and make use of what makes sense to you. Be open and curious to ideas that you are not quite sure about. I invite you to engage with the exercises and allow yourself to absorb into your experience the value of these healing pathways. The feedback I have received is that by engaging in the exercises, this book becomes
alive, and that it becomes vibrantly and powerfully personal. If you choose to work with the exercises, you will entrain and embody the energetics of these healing distinctions, which then transform into wisdom. Make space for these exercises. Savor your answers. Let your fingers type. Let your pen write. Do not overthink your answers. Allow the power of the exercises to well up inside you and sink into your life. Many teachers have patiently guided me to experience more healing in my own life, and I am grateful for them. We all have the capacity to heal specific unresolved experiences and life lessons. If intentional healing is new to you, you may have thought, "I can't," "I don't have time," or "I don't know how." Tibetan Buddhists have an appropriate phrase regarding these thoughts: "Doubt kills the warrior." Believe that you can do this. Take small steps, instead of waiting for unresolved issues to keep surfacing with their increasing personal costs. Find a gifted healer you can trust who can "keep you lovingly focused with their hand on your back to guide you." As you enter into this foreign inner territory to begin exploring what might be a variety of emotions you are not used to embracing, anchor yourself in beautiful images, music, nature, or some other form of positive energy that will inspire you to stay connected to your purpose for healing. Healing is not necessarily furthered by understanding, explaining or analyzing. Rather, healing is a transformational energetic process. It leaves us in a totally different state than merely changing circumstances (jobs, friends, intimate partners). Being complete means the lesson has been learned and the emotional charge has been resolved. It may or may not include flashes of brilliant insight. Living life with the intention of growing and learning as a primary value, and consistently looking for opportunities to forgive and move forward, takes risks that are outside our usual comfort zone. While it is normal to do so—and if we are to heal—we must be aware of not looking backwards and fearing we will repeat our history. This common fear is a barrier to accessing your power to learn about healing. Many of us keep repeating the same lessons with different people because we do not know the power of transformation. When you become more familiar with consistently looking at life through the context of any of these aspects of healing, you can transform your initial perceived risks into staying engaged in healing. Failure and doubt live in the mind; healing comes from Spirit. The more you focus on and remain in a context of transformation, the more you understand that self-compassion does not translate as failure. We learn to pick ourselves up, and we stay committed to being there for ourselves and being present for the people we are most connected to. While healing may include the need for separation and space from family members or lovers, and might require a time-out or pause in circumstances that are not resolving, it certainly does not include abandoning ourselves or others at times of crisis. There is no rule that says "You should heal." Healing is part of our journey of learning and integrating powerful lessons—lessons that usually have negative costs when we keep repeating negative patterns. Without considerable support from loved ones, coaches, and communities who are on similar paths, the giving up of our comfort and fast-paced racing through life with little time for reflection can be challenging to do all alone. We do not have to do this alone. In my personal life I have learned much from men and women in different intimate relationships. While also being the most challenging, my greatest gifts have often been the partners in my life who have offered their love and generosity in reflecting love to me, to themselves and to the world. I have been taught the value of staying in the fire until I am more connected to the Light. If we choose to process our trials and not run away, and if we choose to
use upsets, breakdowns, and disconnects with those we are closest to—we then have opportunities to transform hardships and struggles into extraordinary experiences of life. These healing moments allow us to experience our love at levels that move and inspire us; we witness the courage of our family members, close friends, and lovers as they take on the service of keeping love alive. This kind of courage in adult love is profound. It is normal for close family members and lovers to wallow in their chosen coping strategies, i.e., over- or under-eating, drugging, overworking, staying extremely busy, using alcohol excessively or obsessing over chronic physical symptoms that mysteriously do not get better. Since life can be a process of discovering and healing difficult life lessons, most long-standing committed couples who have weathered challenging circumstances have all been confronted at one time or another with choosing to either leave the relationship or to seriously engage in it and dive deeply into healing unresolved issues. For friends and lovers, the process clarifies if infatuation has been masquerading as love —or if the quality of the love for ourself and the other is unconditional. Engaging and observing the ways we cope with unresolved lessons inherently includes some risk and discomfort. However, the possibility of more sustained love in the face of upsets —along with increased multi-dimensional connectivity, more peace and harmony and more genuine sustained awareness of our essential nature—can offer extraordinarily profound new contexts in which to evaluate what is possible in life. This can happen often when we are willing to be okay with our discomfort. Working with the discomfort I am speaking about is an art, and does not have to persist unless it is resisted. What is this kind of transformation worth to you? You will become more masterful with the nature of healing by being persistent and by allowing yourself to be used by healing energy; do not fall into the trap that something is wrong with you so you have to heal. Many people need to have mental, emotional and physical costs mount up over the years in order to be forced into healing as a last resort. This does not have to be. At any moment we can chose to be a warrior for the spirit and not allow our negative mental patterns to win. We are all programed to think that changing external circumstances will make a difference. We change jobs and lovers; we move and give up companions and friends in the hope that by changing the outside our internal lives will transform. The French have a saying which translates to: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." We are ready to heal when we have suffered enough, or when we have played out our roles until we are forced into a process of healing. We can choose whether or not we want to truly understand the costs of fighting, defending, resisting and not being willing to see and own our unhelpful negative patterns and coping strategies. Our unwillingness to appreciate these conditioned patterns generally results in a seductive upside of hoping we will get back to our previous comfort zone. We all have moments when we are confronted with committing to owning our own blindness, and thus becoming more compassionate with ourselves and one another. We all have choice points in our lives when forgiveness is an option. Our ongoing use of tools that wake us up and generate healing leads to mastery of our lives. This is distinct from: "Here I am again," "I thought I learned this before," "Something must be wrong with me," or "The person I love in my relationship won't change, so I think I should find someone else who understands me better." We all have versions of stories we tell ourselves when we are not ready to slow down and observe the suffering of our interpretations, or our patterns of resisting healing. It can be staggering to realize what we tell ourselves about changing outside players and environments, rather than allowing a master to guide us back through a healing process.
Please do not interpret this to mean that leaving a relationship or taking a break from a continually abusive or unworkable family situation is never warranted. I am referring here to a context of how we tend to move in and out of familial or intimate romantic relationships rather than working things out. Sometimes we are running away from looking closely at our selfdefeating patterns or dismissing opportunities for healing and creating space in which we can truly integrate unresolved ways of being. Sometimes our life might seem like a revolving door of repetitive patterns with our family or partners. Our "machinery" becomes triggered and our default issues rise up faster than we can catch our breath—and before we have time to think about what we really need to do to heal. When you surrender to your own personal capacity for healing, you have incredible power through access to your Light. I use the word "Light" to refer to the Source of our being, the deepest and most profound wisdom and pure love that connects us all as humans. No longer does your conscious or unconscious mind fear that "the dark side" will hijack your awareness or sabotage your access to healing—"the dark side" being the epitome of all that is unworkable, negative beyond the doubt we can see, and the most extreme of undermining forces. The Light will always overcome the dark. n I wish you fun, lightheartedness, and delight as you meet people who are part of the tribe that loves to interact with these ideas. Do not take these ideas so seriously that they offend you or put off others who might think this knowledge is too deep—or worse, that it is too hard. Everyone has their own pace at which they embody healing distinctions. While I personally enjoy comfort and do not believe in "no pain, no gain," I know firsthand that when someone has an intention to heal, "All manner of universal forces can align," and possibly make the process easier than anyone's rational mind could comprehend. Healings are often examples of the miraculous, and miracles are never fully understood. Miracles live in the realm of grace—something granted to us for no reason. Sometimes healing can be analyzed and dissected in order to fully understand all that has taken place to accomplish it. If healing were simply related to intelligence, extremely smart people would be amazing healers. We know that rational understanding and insights can have value, and yet that information is usually not the wisdom needed to influence and shift repetitive, negative patterns. Keep in mind that as divine beings, we always have access to miracles. One of my favorite nuggets of wisdom is commonly attributed to Albert Einstein: "There are two ways to live your life. One is to live as if nothing is a miracle; the other is to live as if everything is." Our minds make everything ordinary; our spirit sees everything as a miracle. Healing is seeing the ordinary in extraordinary ways. Live your life like you are entitled to miracles. Be open to powerfully intend to create healing and use your vast array of skills and lessons learned to access the domains of awareness from whence healing is sourced. This takes courage, and a rearrangement of what is important to you and what you most value in the depth of your being. How you use your time, how you earn money, what you spend your money on, how you take care of others, where you travel, what you eat, how you entertain and how you are entertained all are great ways to gather experiences you wish to celebrate at the end of your life. Celebrations and fun in general can be wonderful doorways for healing if used intentionally and as an effective break from obsessive doing, producing, and focusing on structure and goals.
However, many use fun as a distraction from healing. The accomplishments of healing our life lessons result in a life of profound fulfillment and satisfaction. This is a whole different universe of possibilities from other activities that, while important and worthwhile, are not part of our healing process. The game of all games in life is to integrate all dualities and to experience more harmony and unity in our lives. Be mindful, and include in your prayers that you are open to being blessed by miracles of healing. Do you slow down in the morning as you wake, or at night as you prepare for sleep, to remember your blessings and all you have to be grateful for? On your journey of healing, surround yourself with fellow travelers with whom you can talk and commune about ideas and practices that challenge you. This can immensely reinforce and magnify your breakthroughs. n The normalcy of our culture of consumerism, constant eating, and sensual entertainment is wildly seductive. If you wish to lead a more balanced life that includes healing, it is critical to use the power of community to lift you up and inspire you when your mind gets the best of you. Without some community to inspire us and motivate us to continually think beyond how we are programmed and conditioned to think, most of us devolve into good people working hard, doing the best we can, hoping life will change. We believe that all we need is to be with the right lovers, re-establish ourselves in a better family, and land the optimal job. It is so much easier to look outside when we are with the right person or have the right job. True healing is about looking within ourselves first for how to be more self-compassionate. "What is the blessing-in-disguise for me to learn here?" Without this context, it is easy to interpret why people are thinking that their next relationship will be different because the person is different—without recognizing that what remains constant is an unresolved lesson we are not yet ready to learn. This can be true for romantic relationships, business partnerships, and the people we hire and work closely with. Our minds tend to characterize ourselves and others and put each of us in a box. My belief is that we are all healers. Some people see being a healer as a calling, and constantly learn to acknowledge their own failures and pursue more effective connection and communication in order to heal themselves and others. Conversely, we do not have to be intellectual experts on the nature of healing in order to help someone heal. Some people use their presence, their laughter and humor, their joy and their generosity to offer healing to others. We are attracted to their charisma. The first step in healing is to consciously own that you are a healer. This first step can take years of practice to embody with humility—and without pride and bravado making the declaration meaningless. The second step is to understand that the healing that you choose to engage in does not represent defective pathology or that something is wrong with you. Life is a journey of forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering the purpose of our life. In that service, in that context, we all are continually challenged to be open to owning—without judgment—what is missing and what we might be curious about healing. If we neglect this, our lives can look like a revolving door with different people coming in and out of our lives in different situations, yet when we really look closer, the same lesson is still there for us to heal. Until we are ready, and until we stop resisting our own healing, we are destined to be seduced into believing that life will always be better in a different relationship or
in a different job or location. Yes, the work environments and friends and lovers we choose to be with are critically important. All our relationships have some major or minor influence on whether our unconscious patterns will support us to either survive or thrive. Our intimate relationships are of critical importance to our healing. Intimacy can be viewed as: "into-me-see." We can love another without really allowing the other to see deeply within us. We all have protective defensive mechanisms. The deeper the love we share with friends and lovers, the more our unresolved issues surface. Alcohol, abuse, negative habits of eating, or being with lovers with whom we do not have a deep heart connection will not allow us to expose these exiled parts of ourselves.When we can trust our own connection to our process of healing, we can then allow a few select intimate partners to love us enough to trigger all our disowned parts—if we stay present and do not run away. This is the beginning of using our relationships with others as a crucible for gaining access to the sweetest experiences love can offer us. We allow ourselves to heal in the presence of someone who loves us unconditionally. Some people see intimate relationships as merely playgrounds for fun and then wonder why the fun does not last. If you wish the fun to last—without affairs or needing awarenessaltering substances or without becoming exhausted from working so hard—start to slowly and consciously look at the patterns that undermine your healing. Gradually begin to develop access to the frequencies that slow you down from your distractions. Learn how to quiet your mind more effectively with meditation. Make space for learning how to be more compassionate with yourself or another. Commit to learn about the powerful nature of trust to calm your fears. Our fears often win when we feel more comfortable turning our backs on healing. If you are afraid of healing, I say, "Yes you can!" You deserve healing and the blessings that come with that energy, no matter how many other beautiful, sparkly things you have accumulated. The opportunity of healing can be easier or harder depending on the communities we hang out in, and whether or not our friends and intimate partners are playing our same game of service, contribution and bringing more love into the world. This is not just in our personal family. We are holographic beings, and the healing we do for ourselves, with our most intimate lovers, and our family has ripple effects for the entire world. n I recommend that you take time to do the exercises at the end of each chapter to entrain these ideas into your life. We are creatures of habit and if you slowly develop small practices, you will be amazed at what you can integrate and learn. Find friends and partners who are curious and excited to join you in lightheartedly deepening your connection to healing every day. Seek lovers, friends and workmates who will support your journey to live in the light of awareness, knowing that part of our journey is to forget—and then gently remind each other— that the presence of healing is always available, no matter how much our mind says, "I am tired, I can't do this." If you are anything like me, you will be challenged, you will forget, you will ask for forgiveness, and hopefully your friends and partners will be compassionate when you show up as normal, i.e., a jerk. When you embody these healing practices, you will be attractive, charismatic and very, very lovable. When you fall down and forget, and if you are with a fellow traveler who is also aware of the nature of healing as a game, the two of you can learn how to
clear the energy that comes with forgetting. If there has been previous clearing of negative energy or disrupting habits, this can usually be accomplished without much suffering. Unfortunately, too many people are driven to make life-altering decisions that can change the entire nature of their lives—either because they are not practiced in using healing tools, or they do not trust themselves or others to transform. Effective clearing is a skill of masterful communication, and there are healers who know how to do major resets. I know this from my own personal experience of being trained by some of the most amazing teachers all over the world. These healers work with people in workplaces as well as with couples and families who have too much burden or past, unresolved conflict that makes reconnection for healing seem overwhelming. Some people may not know as much about healing as you now do because of reading this book, and by reading it you can initiate the actual experience of healing. It can also help you to think more clearly and sort out mental confusion. Wonderful insights would have much more sway in redirecting the undertow of our negative conditioning if healing were merely a cognitive process. Meditations and altered states, music, hiking and connecting to the beauty we appreciate in nature are a few of the many pathways that can elicit energy for healing. n Lastly, knowing all of this is not worth much if you do not practice it. In order to be in a energy field of healing, you must have an intention to embody the enormous value of healing. Having fun and being playful always makes the journey easier. I offer you a deep bow of respect for reading this book. Thank you for using this book to support yourself when, amidst the hubbub of our busy and sometimes over-scheduled lives, you are ready to gain more access to healing. Thank you for being my partner in discovering how to take the words off the page and make them come alive by really caring for people in your life with love, passion and fun. All of this makes the trials that deep love goes through worth it. Please share this book with your friends and family. The more we share these messages of self-healing, the more connected we will feel with each other. Give yourself permission to bring your own personal version of healing into the world. Be humble and be clear that you are a warrior for the Light. We cannot put out the darkness; however, we can learn how to work with the dark side of this human experience so that—while being empowered to live our lives on purpose—we live with more love, connection and compassion. Barry Taylor, N.D. June 4, 2020
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