Hello Beauty 🙂

Last Monday, we started this series on the true cost of healing/transformation. <---- Check it out if you missed it 🙂

We covered how the hero's journey is something that we respect deeply as a human race. We talked about how we cherish stories of those who have overcome insurmountable obstacles to become free, happy and healthy individuals, because hearing these stories give us hope for our own journeys. We then covered the first two things that healing is going to cost you.

Today, lets continue on with the final 3 costs of healing, and then lets wrap it all up in a pretty bow, so that you can go off on your healing journey feeling confident that you are safe, protected and that everything is happening to help and serve you.

3. You Will Be Require To Abandon Coping Mechanisms That Are Ultimately Self Destructive, But Which Served You In Your Dis-Ease.

Slowly but surly, you are going to come face to face with the realizations that what you are doing to cope with your life, with your illness, with your dis-ease, is hurting you. You are going to realize that not only do you have a bunch of core beliefs about yourself and the world that keep you stuck in self destructive thought patterns, you also have developed coping mechanism to help you deal with those core beliefs - and those feel really impossible to let go of.

The under eating. The over eating. The drinking. The drugs. The zoning out in front of the T.V for hours a day. The toxic relationships. The burying your head in the sand. The over spending. The overworking to avoid your life. The high risk behaviours. The stuff you have to do to get you through the day, that is simultaneously destroying you - yeah, that stuff.

You are first going to have to get honest that these things are hurting you. And you are going to have to face the fact that they are not your real problem. That they are simply distractions from what is really going on with you.

You are going to have to realize that the only way to figure out what is really going on, what is really off with you, what the real root issue is for you and your life, is to sacrifice your behaviour.

You stop the behaviour(s) so that all those uncomfortable emotions can come to the surface.

So that you can look at those uncomfortable emotions, and start to mine them for their treasures.

I was not ever going to get better from anorexia until I stopped starving myself. I could have talked about my childhood and my brain chemistry and my self hate until I was blue in the face - but so long as I was engaging in my self destructive behaviour, I was not really progressing towards healing. Because I still had my drug that was keeping the truth of what was going on for me buried. That was the point of it. I needed starving to help keep all the self hate, fear and doubt at bay. And so long as it was at bay, so long as I was not really FEELING it, even if I was aware of it, I was not healing.

You are going to have to stop doing your self destructive behaviours, and you are going to have to learn to be with the emotions that arise when you do. Those things that you do to keep the feelings under the surface have to be released, so that you can process those feelings. You can't heal/transform fully and keep hurting yourself at the same time.

4. You Are Going To Have To Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable

Following the last point, what is very important to understand is that all those negative emotions that come up when you start backing away from your coping mechanisms, are the exact emotions that will show you what it is that you believe that is out of alignment with your truth, and thus why you are sick and stuck in the first place.

You are going to have to do new things. To try different foods. To stop doing what you have been doing for a long time. You are going to have to start to explore ideals and points of view that you have outright rejected or never even knew existed before.

All of which is going to be something that a big part of you fights with and resists. Because change - on any level - is scary.

But know this - everything you are doing now, was once new and unfamiliar to you. This is what is so amazing about the human brain - it adapts. It can become comfortable and familiar with anything - including being uncomfortable and venturing into unknowns.

Learning to be ok with your uncomfortable emotions is the biggest tool you are going to acquire on your journey. Because those emotions are the ones that carry your healing. Your breakthroughs. Your humanity. Your truest and most aligned self. Learning to be with those emotions and to be able to figure out what they are telling you, will be the ultimate healing step.

Your new habits and uncomfortable emotions you have been stuffing down for years will only feel foreign for a little while. Even the very act of changing your habits and embracing new ways of thinking and being will only feel weird and uncomfortable for a period of time. Then you will start to get used to it. Your healthy way of being, your healing, your transformation will become natural.

You will get to your B, and it will feel like home.

So when life is pushing you to stretch outside of your comfort zone, when it is asking you to feel emotions you have run from for so long, again this is no curse. This is a blessing. See it as temporary discomfort for the longer term benefit of getting you nice and accepting of your new, healed place. Because that is what is happening.

5. You Will Need To Shift Your Focus From Where You Are, To Where You Want To Go

This is the most important piece of advice I can give you. If you take nothing from this except for this point, you are going to be at a huge advantage on your healing/transformation journey.

The thing here is this: it is SO EASY to get all caught up in where you are, focusing on all that is wrong, all that is holding you back, all the challenges you are facing, all of the pain, suffering and discomfort that you are feeling. It is really easy to get caught up in the idea that reminding yourself all day long what is wrong, what you don't like, what you need to fix or change or improve is going to move you along your path faster. That if you continue to remain fully aware of how terrible where you are is, that you will shoot yourself rapidly to your new, healed and healthy life.

There literally could not be anything farther from the truth.

While it is absolutly vital that you are able to be totally honest with yourself about where you are, and to acknowledge what you are feeling in this moment - putting all your focus on what is wrong is one of the main things that is keeping you stuck.

It is not about totally ignoring what is truly happening in your life, nor is it about dwelling on it with all of your might.

You must create and then hold a vision of yourself at your healed/transformed place. Create this vision, and then spend as much time as possible focusing on this vision.

This will help you to start cultivating a feeling state that you can start to familiarize yourself with. This will help you to cultivate an idea of how you will act, how you will think, how you will BE when you are at your B. This vision and this feeling state is key to a complete transformation/healing.

The idea here is to help you start to shift your internal state, so that you start to align more with your healed self than you do with your dis-eased state. So that you can start to identify with being the healed/transformed person more than you identify with being in your dis-eased state.

Right now, you identify with being in your dis-eased state. In order to make the transition from where you are to where you want to go, you are going to have to adjust your self image. Because you will ALWAYS live up to your own expectation of who you are. Of what you are. Holding a new vision of yourself at your healed place, and continually practicing 'seeing' yourself in this new way will make the transition there so.much.easier. There will be no crash into your new reality and a lack of knowing how to be there. This is what will help you release resistance to the new, scary, unknown healed/transformed life. This is where you practice being who you are becoming. Create the vision, hold it, feel it, as often as possible. Acknowledge where you are, while holding the vision for where you are headed.

The Bottom Line:

Healing/Transformation is going to require that you forsake all evidence that supports your stuckness.

You have to allow yourself to let go of your perceived inadequacies and all your REASONS for feeling how you feel.

Because we all have those reasons.

And technically those reasons are legitimate.Things did happen to you. People did say things that caused you to change yourself or hide yourself or feel that you were not allowed to be who you are. You are not wrong that what happened to you that lead you here was horrible. Not wrong at all.

But holding onto the stuff that got you here, is not going to let you heal.

Letting go is the most major part of healing.

So Now What?

The purpose of this article is not to shame you. Not to scare you. Not to tell you that you are wrong or bad or stupid for being where you are. I did not intend to make you realize that you are stuck and sick and that it is your fault.

Not at all. It's not your fault in any way.

This is not about admitting that you are wrong or that you have to change.

The purpose of this article is this - you deserve to heal. You deserve happiness. You deserve freedom.

Also, you are human, just like the rest of us. And we as humans tend to get ourselves all tied up in knots, and we can easily lose track of what things are helping us and which are hindering us.

The thing is, you do not have to actively pursue any of the items mentioned in this article. If there is any cell in your body that wants to heal, the things mentioned above are going to simply show up in your reality.

What I wanted to do was show you how these things are trying to help you. How the challenges to your mindsets, the challenges to your habits and all that are there to SERVE YOU. Not to hurt you. Not to shame you. Not to blame you. They are there to give you the tools to be free. They are showing up for you for one reason, and one reason only - your ultimate liberation.

And sometimes, moving from bondage to freedom, looks like moving form bondage to just a different kind of uncomfortable. And it does often times.

I simply wanted to provide for you a road map, so that when these things show up in your life, you are have an easier time trusting them. You can look at them and see that they are all there to serve you, not to harm or hinder you. So that you can take your journey, so you can be in your middle, and be more relaxed about it - because you know the secret. You know why.

So enjoy your middle. Be easy and relaxed about it. It will all unfold for you, and all you have to do is go with it, and trust that it is ALL for your good - even when it does not feel like it.

<3