Radical Healing

When we choose not to change, perhaps by simply letting the window of opportunity for transformation pass by, we miss the opportunity to heal, and we open the door to chronic illness in our lives. This is why healing starts with emotional honesty about the fact that it’s time to change. Because chronic illnesses happen when we don’t make fundamental changes in our self-care and in our mental attitude and emotional posture toward life and health that we could have made a long time ago. But didn’t. 

To change is to adapt, and to adapt is to heal in ways that may be new and different, or may be tried and true, but that nonetheless aren’t habitual, aren’t pre-patterned, and therefore, aren’t unconscious. To change for better health is to be conscious about the changes you make to return to a state of greater wellbeing, as a person, as a family, and as a collective.

When we let go and embrace healthy change, something remarkable happens. We change with our environment. And by so doing, we change our environment by becoming part of the change we know needs to happen. We let ourselves move and morph in a dynamic flow that, like a river, can carry us far downstream with little effort. Far away from a former self who may have gotten stuck in the past. And that’s a good thing, because change never happens in the past.

Change only ever happens in the present. The present moment is the river of life. it’s our personal choice if we want to go down that river. To find out who we will be if we change.

There is some ancient Sanskrit wisdom on change that I like to turn to in moments of transition. Whether personal or collective, these principles apply. It goes like this. There are three operators that we see at work in Nature. The Maintenance Operator, where energy is a system goes to maintaining what has been created so that it is sustained. Then there is the Destructor Operator—known as Durga. Durga is decay, it is things falling apart before your very eyes. It is death. When Durga comes it is because it’s time for change. And in the natural world life is decaying all the time. Decay is part of life. But if it goes on too long, it can become destructive. It can become sickness, and disease. Ignoring it won’t change it. Trying to maintain what was in the past will only make it worse. And then there is the Creator Operator. Creation is the growth of spring after a long winter. It is the times when the system puts all its energy into new growth and dynamic change and innovation. In Creation, we birth the new out of the destruction of the old. And in this way life continues.

There comes a time when we know in our hearts that if we put any more energy into maintaining what has been, what we’ve been doing, and how we’ve been living, that it will come to naught. It will be energy wasted that could have been utilized to create something new. When it’s time to heal, we embrace the Creator Operator in our lives. And we allow ourselves to change.

Kelly Turner, PhD, author or Radical Remission, has studied over 1,500 cases of medical remissions and spontaneous healings, identifying over a hundred changes people made. These nine came up in everyone’s list.  

—Radically changing your diet.

—Taking control of your health

—Following your intuition

—Using herbs and supplements

—Releasing suppressed emotions

—Increasing positive emotions

—Embracing social support

—Deepening your spiritual connection

—Having a strong reason for living

Our pituitary, the gland that hangs suspended from the third ventricle deep in our brain, releases oxytocin, dopamine, relaxin, serotonin and endorphins when you meditate and make a spiritual connection. That’s our human technology at work. And we need those happy hormones turned on for healing to really take root. That’s the bodymind’s truth. It wants to be happy to be healthy, and it wants to be healthy to be whole. 

Holding onto emotions that you don’t want to feel, or that are so traumatizing that you can’t bear to look them in the face, can really make you sick. Like waste, they need to come out somatically and emotionally to be eliminated from the bodymind. Now emotions are physical. They’re embodied, so what are we talking about here. We’re talking about some serious snotty crying, and spitting out sorrows, and breaking out in a sweat, and flushing and clenching our jaws and fists and beating the sky with grief and anger. We’re talking about collapsing on the floor feeling overwhelmed, and feeling all of your emotions like a tide washing in so that it can wash it away once and for all. It helps if you know how to detox, trust me. The easiest and fastest way to release stuck emotions is to do a physical detox, because they’re connected. It’s easy to surrender to your feelings if you physically feel light, if you radically change your diet and take control of your health so that your tissues are alkaline, your cells are hydrated, and you are breathing in that life-giving prana as if your life depended on every breath you take. Because it does. Each breath, in each moment. The moment for change and healing. This is the time when what you know about supplements and herbs, and what you let go of in terms of pills and treatments that only address symptoms but don’t get down to the bottom of healing, really make a difference. All the difference. Because healing is a spiritual journey, not a science. Science can help us, but it cannot save us from ourselves when it comes to healing.

It’s up to you to let yourself change, to let yourself heal. Your body is hardwired to do it. Sometimes we just have to get out of our own way. And this is why having a strong purpose in life is so important to healing. That purpose gives you courage, and also helps you surrender your ego to something bigger. Healing may not be what you thought you wanted, if what you thought you wanted was something you had in the past. Healing is change, and change can be frightening. But in the uncertainty of what will happen next, faith in your own intuition and having a higher reason for living grounds you in the healing process and keeps you steadfast. It keeps you calm so that healing can take place, because healing is an internal process, and stress shuts it off. That’s why stress causes chronic illness more than anything else. And that’s why healing starts with that deep breath that slows you down, that walk in the woods, that feeling of peace. Meditate on that, and be well.

Check out the film Heal for more information on spontaneous healing.