Quickest way to abundant health 

Why making healthy choices is hard 

Many of us know the right things to do for our health yet largely don’t do them.  We know vegetables and exercise are good for our body, that reading and meditation are good for our mind and that giving to others and following our bliss are good for our soul, yet we don’t consistently do these things. Perhaps we get inspired and create a change for a little while, but typically we find ourselves back to our old habits 3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years down the road.

So why is so hard to create consistent healthy choices?  Truth be told we are pretty undisciplined when it comes to creating and sustaining change.  Unless something hurts really bad or threatens our life in some way its pretty difficult for us to take action to do something differently.  Even once a new pattern develops it requires quite a bit of reinforcement.  So how do we find and sustain the energy to create healthy habits for ourselves in body, mind and spirit?  The quickest way to abundant health is to take responsibility for your awareness.

Take responsibility for your awareness

Commitment and discipline

Anytime a person embarks on a path of self-improvement in any way, whether they want to improve physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually, they must first discover how they are currently operating.  I would say that 80-90% of people don’t actually know how they are operating, meaning they are not aware of their patterns and how they are creating them.  People are mostly operating in automatic pilot mode, unconscious, oblivious and feeling victimized in some way to their current state.  If you are thinking to yourself “I don’t feel victimized” then let me reframe it in this way for you.  If you feel like you have no ability to change your state (whether that state is physical, emotional, mental or spiritual) you are essentially operating as being victimized.  Your sense of power is outside of you and therefore you are disempowered and at the whim of circumstance.  This is the consciousness of stage 1 and 2 of SRI.

At some point people become aware, either through reflection from another person or through their own self-reflection, of a pattern and how they are creating that pattern.  At this point awareness moves from “my back hurts here”, speaking  as if your back is something separate from you that is misbehaving in some way, to the awareness of “I see how I am creating this pain in my back”.  This is an incredibly profound level of awareness and it’s instantly refreshing because finally you begin to feel as if YOU can do something about your state and that is empowering.  However the buck doesn’t stop there.  Say you discovered that ever time you eat sugar, argue with your spouse or have the thought that you’re worthless, your back hurts in this one spot, yet you keep eating sugar, yelling at your spouse and having crappy thoughts about yourself.  You are not taking responsibility for your newfound awareness and therefore you continue to feel the pain in your back and ignore the change you need to create. If you don’t heed the awareness once you are aware, the path will get more challenging for you.  Your body will speak louder and get more “diseased” until you make the required change.  This is the consciousness of stage 3 of SRI where you see your patterns but feel stuck and can’t seem to move forward to take the action required.  Often times at this point people will go back down to stage 2 consciousness and look for someone or something outside of themselves to fix their pain or get rid of their problem, giving away their power again, because they don’t want to make the change required.

If instead a person is ready to move forward and make the change required they go into the consciousness of SRI stage 4, which is reclaiming their power.  They declare “enough of this” pattern, thought, way of being, etc and they begin to move into transformation.  This is where you take full responsibility for your pattern and for creating the necessary change.  This is not an “easy” stage of consciousness and its not something you do just one time and your done.  You reclaim over and over and over again in order to continue to create the necesary change, until you do it and its done.  And down the road when the old pattern surfaces or gets triggered you again see your pattern, how your creating it and commit again to engage in life in this new way that is required.

Most people don’t commit.  They may for a little while but then it starts to feel too hard so they distract themselves with things that temporarily feel better or offer “relief” and thus they fall into old patterns.  This is when you hear people say “xyz didn’t work for me”.  Its not that ‘xyz’ didn’t work, its that they didn’t commit to it working.  If you are not seeing change in the direction you want to see change then you are either unaware of your pattern or not following through with your awareness.  There is no way around this.  You must go through this if you want to sustain change.  There are no magic pills or quick fixes.  This is the work required to become a fully empowered and awake/aware being.

So the dichotomy is that this is the “quickest” way to true health, but this is not a quick path.  Even though “quick fixes” are so much more appealing to us because they don’t require us to change, they prolong the path and therefore prolong us from experiencing abundant health.  They keep us searching outside of ourselves, when the true solution comes from inside of us and is directly related to our level of commitment to take responsibility for our own selves.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Tomato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado