healing

The Healing Journey

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THE HEALING JOURNEY 

Impatience

We are a quick fix society.  We want everything to happen instantly, if not yesterday.  Patience is not a virtue that many of us have anymore.  If our Amazon package comes a day or two later than what was originally projected we are irritated.  If we want to lose weight, but haven’t achieved our ideal size in 3 weeks time, we give up.  If the business we are creating isn’t up and thriving in 6 months time we see it as failure or not destined to be.  We think that everything is supposed to happen overnight, and don’t have much bandwidth for the journey.  The same is true for our healing.  If we have a sensation or feeling that we don’t like we think it’s supposed to be gone yesterday.  If we have thought patterns that we’ve been entertaining for most of our life we assume we should be able to completely be free of them in an instant.  When our sensation persists, the feelings we don’t want are still there and we continue to entertain thoughts that don’t serve us we see failure, either our own, or we project that sense of failure outwards onto others and see them as failing us.    

Even though we conceptually know that life is not about the destination but rather the journey, we are all trying to get to the destination.  We are all trying to get somewhere other than where we are.  We are trying to get out of this uncomfortable human experience rather than be present in it.  The attempt to get it over with (it being the sensation, feeling, thought, or experience that we don’t like or want) is our true suffering.  The result of resisting where we are is this gnawing, unsettling, anxious, depressive, distressful and disconnected state.  We go into wanting answers and certainty.  We jump from thing to thing thinking that our answers lie inside one of those things.  We think if we can just get some certainty about something then we will feel better.  If we could just know when this experience we don’t like will end, then we could rest.  Our impatience with not knowing and trying to get somewhere else, hijacks our capacity to be present and to heal.  We will not be able to touch healing or presence until we get this. 

Metamorphosis naturally emerges from presence.  Resistance keeps what’s in place in place.  Melting into what is frees us from it.  All of these things seem contradictory to the mind that thinks it needs to do something in order to fix it.  I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a time for action, quite the contrary.  Perfectly orchestrated action occurs when we come into agreement with what is.  The journey of healing is the return to wholeness, yet wholeness is now.  Unless we see the wholeness now, we not see it when we arrive at our preferred weight, when our business takes off, or when the sensations and feelings we think interfere with our experience of wholeness go away.   

SHOWING UP FOR YOURSELF

Learning the lessons of life

It takes a great deal of showing up for yourself in order to stop the pattern of impatience, which is really just avoiding the moment.  What do I mean by showing up for yourself?  I mean staying the course, being committed, having persistence, doing whatever it takes and being all in.  Don’t be flaky.  Dig your heels in.  Remember why you are and what’s important to you.  Don’t give up so easily.  Stop seeking instant gratification.  Surrender to your experience.  Celebrate the little and big victories every day, not just when what you think you want arrives.  The journey is a sequence of a billion tiny steps.  See the gift in each one.  Don’t want anything to go away.  Be more grateful for what is then you are desirous to achieve your goal.  Watch how that changes everything.

The reason that this changes everything is because you change.  The reason why being impatient and waiting for circumstances to change doesn’t make you any happier or bring you greater peace is because you don’t change in the process.  Something will arise inside of your experience in the next day, or week or month and you will find yourself cycling back into the same feelings of being impatient and wanting to get somewhere else.   You will never feel settled in yourself.  It’s not the circumstance changing that does anything except perhaps provide temporary relief.  The same gnawing, unsettling, anxious, depressive, distressful and disconnected state will follow you no matter what happens or doesn’t happen if you don’t realize that you are the source of it all.

Healing has absolutely nothing to do with anything going away.  Every sensation, feeling and thought that you have, that you don’t like, is a catalyst for you in some way.  What that means is that it contains learning for you.  There is something you are to discover, learn, accept and/or transform inside of you through this experience.  That’s it.  Despite all of our conditioning, which leads us to believe that healing is about certain feelings and sensations going away, this is not the case.  You can be perfectly healed, perfectly whole, and still experience feelings and sensations.  In fact it’s nearly guaranteed that you will.  When you approach feeling and sensation as information for learning and growth, rather than as a problem to be gotten rid of, you are effectively utilizing the catalyst that your higher self is offering you to learn whatever it is you need to learn.  

I’ve discovered over the years that nothing shifts until we learn what we are to learn from it.  Even if one sensation “goes away”, if we haven’t learned the lessons from it, it will manifest in another way or form.  You just can’t get rid of your learning, despite how hard you might try at times.  Just to be clear this is not a form of punishment from our higher self to us, but rather it’s a gift.  I know it can be hard to believe that, especially when we really dislike our sensations, feelings or experiences, yet everything in this universe is working for us, it’s not out to get us.  Imagine if you can start to see and experience everything from this lens.  How differently would you experience your sensations and feelings?  How much more readily would the lessons be apparent to you rather than you aimlessly seeking for answers and solutions?  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

More than Enough

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MORE THAN ENOUGH

Coping strategies to avoid

Feeling like we are not enough is the most pervasive of human wounds.  It is a cloak nearly all of us wear.  A deep sense of inadequacy, unworthiness, and unlovability.  Our biggest fear is that we are not lovable and that who we are is not valuable, and because of this we seek outside of ourselves for significance and love, thinking that it must be elsewhere.  That it must be something that we need to earn, achieve or somehow otherwise get.  This patterning, and our belief in our unlovability interferes more with the expression of ourselves than anything else does.  It is our biggest roadblock to fulfillment, health and well-being.  It stops us in our tracks, keeps us in our comfort zone, allows us to think small, live small and keep a certain distance from ourselves and others.

We have all learned strategies to cope or manage with the sense of fundamentally being not enough.  So much so that you might not even recognize the not enough story playing in the background of your psyche.  Some people learn to achieve, do and accomplish in order to not hear that voice of not enough.  Others learn to give as much as possible to others hoping that their not enoughness won’t be seen in the flurry of doing for others.  Other strategies include distracting ourselves with whatever we can find to distract ourselves with, leaving our body and living up in our heads or far away in the stars, creating or maintaining unaligned relationships, and/or distancing ourselves from life and others.  We all have utilized or are utilizing some or all of these strategies.  Without doing so life would be unimaginably hard.  Yet there is a cost to these strategies, which is that we never get to really just be or relax as ourselves.  

This keeps us exhausted and the fulfillment of the moment and the sweetness of life never seem to arrive.  It often feels like they are somewhere other than where we are.  If we can just keep up our strategies then we will get there.  We can see it on the horizon, even taste it, but it always seems like it’s just right out of our reach.  Never being able to surrender to and feel the not enoughness we keep at our strategies, convinced we will arrive in bliss, yet bliss can’t get in.  It can’t reach us or touch us because it is a completely different frequency than what we are currently constituting ourselves as (ie. not enough).  We can’t see how we are keeping all of it at bay.  We just believe that we are almost there while continuing to convince ourselves that there is somewhere else we can get too.  The thing is that there isn’t.  So that idea that we have in our mind stays just as that, an idea of fulfillment, bliss, and well-being that we continually chase and almost just touch, but never live. 

FINDING THE GIFT  

Being all that you are

Inside of every wound there is a gift.  In fact the entire spiritual journey is moving from wound into the gift of whatever the wound gives us.  It’s seeing how we couldn’t be who we are and share what we do without that wound.  However we can’t always just jump right into the gift from the wounded place.  There is learning involved (ie. transformation) before we can resolve, come to peace and give the gift that the wound gave us.  Even though most of us know conceptually that we are enough, many have not embodied it.  If they had we would be living in an incredibly self-empowered world, which we are not.  Rather we live constricted by our inner fears of expressing ourselves, of being not accepted by others, of not being able to make it, of not deserving, of being judged, cast out, separated, and of being left alone.  We feel these fears as limitations and often rather than noticing our deep story of inadequacy and unlovability we go into feeling like we don’t know how.  We think if we just knew the how or the what of our next step or steps then everything would be clear and we would feel better.

Not knowing how or what is our biggest “excuse”, if you will, to not move into our expression, power and worth.  It’s how we avoid, deny or escape the feelings of not enoughness.  The first step in any transformational process is courage.  That means courage to feel not enough rather than stuff it down or pretend that it’s not there (ie. spiritual bypassing).  Without acknowledging and feeling not enough we don’t have the energy, fuel or momentum to take new actions.  This is why we frequently feel like we don’t know how/what.  While it’s true that you may not know all of the details, when you face not enoughness head on you generate an inner power that knows how to figure it all out, even the stuff you currently don’t know.  

Often I hear people say that they don’t want to feel certain things, such as not enoughness, because they feel like they will never get out of them.  Like they will fall into a pit of despair from which there is no escape.  I find that the real pit of despair is avoidance of what we are feeling and/or staying in the story of what we are feeling, while not actually feeling what we feel.  The result of avoiding what we feel is that we experience stagnation, we feel stuck, we don’t grow, we continue to feel bound in limitation and never generate the energy we need to change.  While feeling things, like our sense of unworthiness or not enoughness, is not a picnic in the park, it will with time generate movement in your system.  You will start to see a pathway through.  You will begin to feel a hunger surge up inside of you.  You will take new action, think different thoughts, and see things in novel ways.  A power will rise up in you that says, “Enough of this!  I am enough! I do deserve! I do matter!”.  You become less and less afraid to express or be yourself.  You will discover the paradox of the simultaneity of relaxation and action.  

The gift in having the courage to face, feel and transform is that you give what you learn.  The world needs the gift of you.  No one else can be the specific frequency or flavor that you are.  Your flare is perfectly as it should be.  None is better or worse.  Moving that knowing from concept into embodiment is the missing link.  To surrender to who you are, just as you are, perceived inadequacies and all, everything included, is when you truly become a channel for all that you are here to be.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

INTENTION & FOCUS

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INTENTION & FOCUS 

A dash of magic

Intention guides life.  Life follows focus.  To some degree we all know this yet most of us aren’t really utilizing the power of it in our day to day life.  Rather we are often unfocused, scattered and distracted.  We decide for a moment or maybe two, that we want to feel a certain way, walk in a particular direction, or take hold of our state of being, but in the next moment we forget it.  We then wonder why we can’t seem to have the healing, life or state of being that we desire.  Then, on top of it all, we have a long list of impossibility beliefs to add into the mix.  If we muster up our will and utilize our focus, then this or that impossibility belief rears its head.  Feeling overwhelmed by it all, we stop in our tracks and give up.  We return to distraction because we can’t seem to find a way through.  We find ourselves feeling stuck, like we (or things) will never change and we feel resigned to life the way it is.  

I think the prime difference between people who feel like they are living aligned and those that struggle to stay aligned is harnessing the power of intention and focus, along with not being afraid of a little magical thinking.  If you’ve ever spent any time around a baby you know that they see the world through the lens of magic.  Something appears in front of their visual field and they get absolutely ecstatic.  They have no idea how it arrived or even what it is.  They are simply enamored and in a state of bliss by whatever it is they see.  They attempt to interact with it however they can, having no idea at all what to do with it.  This is what we call playing.  Then due to the fact that they have no label, definition or meaning, all they experience is magic.  Magic being the essence of the thing and not the thing itself.  As soon as we give names to things we no longer see the magic, and rather see only what we’ve decided something is.  All other possibilities flatten.  

The other thing to notice is that when babies are playing they are totally focused.  They quite dislike it when you remove their “object of magic”, which they are entirely engrossed in.  Their attention might move from toy to toy, but they are just as present with the next non-labelled, no meaning magical thing that arrives into their sensory experience.  As we become toddlers and begin to develop our analytical thinking mind we want to know what everything is and what it all means.  We start to get lost in the world of concepts rather than in the pure potential of what is.  Our minds learn to multi-task and focus on facts, details and the like.  We lose connection to the essence of things and begin to focus on the things themselves.   We move out of present moment and into thought.  

IMAGINATION & REALITY 

Increasing will

And well who doesn’t love thinking?  To just let your mind wander from this thing to that thing.  To be lost in thought.  To contemplate.  To imagine.  It’s fun to imagine, yet for many it stops here.  You might think that imagination is just imagination, not reality.  You may even be very good at imagining, yet if you don’t have any intention or focus behind your imaginations they remain formless.  This is not a problem, again it’s great fun to imagine in our minds, it’s only that you will not have a different human world life experience.  You will be living in thought or concept.  There will be a disconnection between your imaginal world (you could also say your desired world) and what you actually experience.  We are at a stage of human development, in this space-time nexus, where there is massive disconnection between our desired realities and the ones we are living in.  It doesn’t need to be that way, however it does take a heap of intentional focus in order to bridge the seeming gap.

Intentional focus might not be as hard as it seems, but it may appear to come at some sacrifice.  See when we align ourselves with our intention and focus we have to let all of the other stuff go.  That other stuff consists of a lot.  It includes, but is not limited to all of our divergent or distracting thoughts, all of our tendencies to avoid what we think can or can’t be, our habits of comfort, our low demand energy states, our pictures or ideas of what our intention is supposed to look, be or feel like. We have so so so so many ideas, and while ideas are great for imagining possibilities, they can also get in the way of letting the picture of it all reveal itself to you.  Our desires or imaginations are like the seeds, our intention and focus the water, and the sprouting flower just sprouts as it does.  We don’t get to decide it’s appearance.  We can guide and set conditions for it, but we can determine its expression.  We can only nurture it’s becoming and then let it be what it will be. 

If we are too fixated in our analytical mind then we will overly focus on the form of what is.  We will perceive disappointment if the form doesn’t match our desire.  If we return to our infant pre-mind state, we can see only the essence, the magic, the seed, the desire and then accept the form, the picture, the image that is the result.  This acceptance is very different than resignation.  Acceptance sees the beauty in the appearance regardless, where resignation sees only what is doesn’t want in the appearance.  The distinction is the seer (ie. you).  From where do you see?  

Harnessing the power of intention and focus is learning to increase your will.  To be determined without attachment.  This is the dance of will and surrender.  Coming from and with everything you’ve got and then with full embrace letting it be as it is.  Giving or aligning your whole self to your intention in any given moment is magic.  Essence is seen and the forms naturally reconfigure in response.  This is not a forceful or manipulative will, but rather a sacrificial will of sorts.  A will that will give away all of its petty distractions, impossibility beliefs and preconceived ideas for its true desire or intention.  A will that aligns behinds itself and that is self-generative.  A will that takes all of you, but of which you can find absolutely nothing better to give yourself too.  A will that eventually becomes much bigger than you.

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

HEALING TO SERVING

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HEALING TO SERVING 

Rhythms of development

There are many rhythms in this cosmic-human dance.  Stages of development, themes, and learnings that we all experience.  The stages themselves are quite predictable, but the content of them and how we learn what we learn, is unique for each being.  Each stage or rhythm is whole onto itself and yet is part of larger wholeness.  The goal of each stage or rhythm is to be in it.  To be where you are even if you don’t like where you are or wish you were at some other place on the path.  Integration or learning occurs when you accept where you are, and then naturally the next rhythm or stage reveals itself to you.  It’s synonymous with a child who rolls over, sits up, crawls, stands and then walks.  Each next developmental step reveals itself as the child masters where it’s at.  The child does not go from rolling over straight to walking even it really wants to.  There is a natural sequence and staging to the learning.  

We are all like children, learning and developing as we go.  While our development is less focused on achieving sensory-motor milestones and more on the development of our consciousness, perspectives and inner workings, it is nonetheless still development.  Sometimes there are shortcuts or quick accelerations, but they are rare.   We must master each stage before moving to the next one.  For example, it’s quite challenging to sustainably go from believing you are a separate person, into knowing there are no others in a quick flash.  While you might have a momentary experience of this in a peak state, there are many stages in between that must first be learned in order for you to go beyond conceptual knowing into living your knowing.

One such stage of our development could be called “healing”.  There are many rhythms inside of healing, but for simplicity sake we could say that healing is the stage of our development where we believe that we are not whole.  Our perspective is such that something is/was wrong or lacking in our self, experience or environment, and we seek to find completion or wholeness.  The end of healing is the knowing that there is no (and never was) disharmony, imperfection or lack.  It’s knowing that the natural state of all is complete.  That there is nothing lacking inside or outside in all of creation.  In the perceived space from healing to wholeness there is a whole slew of learning that is primarily concerned with you reclaiming and remembering your power, what you are, and that you are the creator of all you experience.  So much so until your only response to any event, sensation, emotion, thought, or experience is love.  Once achieved, you know wholeness as all that is, and move forward into the next stage of development called service.   

LIFE BEYOND HEALING 

Dare to heal

Some people might think it’s arrogant to think that you could ever stop needing to heal.  They see healing as something you must do forever, that it has no end, and that you are either arrogant or spiritually bypassing something if you even entertain that you could live whole.  I personally don’t agree with that perspective, but as always choose whichever perspective resonates and feels more accurate for you.  I see healing as a stage of development, not the be all end all.  Healing is a stage where the focus is on ourselves and our inner workings.  It is about unearthing or unpacking our disempowering, discordant and incoherent patterns and ways of being.  It is revealing the ways we have deceived ourselves, how we’ve believed things that feel bad and ultimately are not true, and where we see ourselves as a product or circumstance of life rather than as the creator of our life.  It is a correction of the perspective of seeing lack into seeing only wholeness.  Healing is an absolutely important, vital, and necessary stage of development, one that can’t be overstepped or passed by, and there is both learning and life beyond healing.  

Life beyond healing is serving.  In service the focus is no longer on you.  It’s not about what you think is right or better.  It’s not about what you want to happen or any outcome at all.  It’s not about validating, empowering yourself or making yourself feel good.  It’s not about sensations in your body coming or going away.  It’s not about becoming worthy.  All of those things must be known, must be intact, must be taken care of, for the next rhythm of your development to be revealed to you, which is that of serving.  Service is oriented towards giving and is rested in the heart.  If you don’t clear up all of those other things in your life and know all as whole, than your service will always have some personal agenda in it, which is not really service, but is still part of your own healing process.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, in fact I’d say almost all of us do this as we are healing and developing, but at some point there is a demarcation.  A kind of line in the sand in which where you come from is serving rather than healing.  

Serving is not better than healing.  It’s simply the next developmental stage on the path.  Just like for the toddler, walking is not better than standing up.  Walking simply proceeds as the next learning once we master standing.  Mastering healing is knowing your worth, knowing all is well & has always been well, and that nothing is outside of perfection even if you don’t like it or agree with it.  As you move towards mastering healing you realize that your life is not yours; it never has been.  You’ve never been a separate person with a separate life.  To the person that is in an early to middle stage of healing, this would be ludicrous to entertain.  In fact it is imperative that they realize that they are a person and that they can impact their emotions, their body and their environment.  That learning must be integrated first, which is why you must always accept where you are.  Learn the lessons of the place and stage that you are in.  Nothing is better somewhere else, it’s just different.  Enjoy wherever you are.  Find levity in everything.  Make it as fun as you can.  Ultimately it’s all smoke and mirrors.  Energetic patterns configuring and reconfiguring into infinity.  Just play and enjoy it all.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

THE EDGE OF EMOTION

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THE EDGE OF EMOTION 

Risking feeling

Feeling feels risky.  So much so that we often stay on the edge of it.  Feeling emotion means something is going to change, which is destabilizing to our sense of the known.  It is a mini death and rebirth, and most of us don’t like the death part very much.  Death of an idea, dream, or way of being.  Oftentimes we think we are feeling emotion, but we are just on the surface of what is really going on.  To authentically feel, rather than regurgitating triggered surface emotions, is the difference between acceptance of what is and resistance to it.  Acceptance is hard for most, so rather than feeling we stay in the spin of frustration, irritation or mental activity, which keeps us from having to actually feel even though we think that we are.  

Why is it that we avoid feeling like it’s the plague?  It boils down to the fact that in general most of us don’t like to feel heartbreak, and heartbreak is what authentic feeling feels like.  It’s tender, raw, and vulnerable.  The heartbreak we feel is in association with something occurring that we wished was different.  Perhaps it was a way we were treated that we didn’t like, a need or desire that wasn’t met, or some situation that went down in a way we wished it wouldn’t have.  The tendency for most people is to start to think about the situation or event rather than feel what they feel about it.  They rationalize, they judge or condemn, they feel irritated or maybe aloof and disconnected, they can’t seem to let it go no matter what amount spiritual self-talk they do around it.  There is a tendency to feel at a loss or confused about “what to do” and many attempts to figure it out.  The intense mental thought of needing to figure out what to do or say is a high indication that there is resistance to what is, and deeper more real feelings to be felt.

There is a phrase I heard in chiropractic college that went “you have to feel it to heal it”.  What it boils down to is that healing is accepting what is.  When we accept what is, change then effortlessly flows from acceptance.  There is no more needing to figure anything out or mental looping about it.  We simply know what to do if anything needs to be done.  Sometimes there is nothing to do and that can be super challenging for our minds, particularly when we really want something to be different, hence our prolonged resistance to actual feeling.  However as soon as we do feel the heartbreak of the dream, the idea, the hope, or the thing, acceptance ensues and it becomes easy to let be what is.  This leaves us with inner peace and spaciousness of mind.  We become receptive rather than insistent.  In our receptivity the path of what’s next is revealed to us.   

FREEDOM THROUGH EMOTION 

Action from love

Sometimes the difference between thinking our emotions versus feeling our emotions can be tricky for us to discern.  A good indicator to use for yourself is that if you don’t feel freer than you aren’t actually feeling, but rather you are caught in a story about feeling.  Another way to discern this is the amount of time you are “feeling”.  Emotions, when felt, have a very short time span.  Typically a few seconds to a few minutes at most.  If you are going on hours, days or weeks of “feeling” something then you are often in the story of it rather than the feeling of it.  Now after you feel something deeply there can be residual feelings, but your general disposition is lighter and more free even if some residual effects are still present.  Also after feeling there you are softer and in a slower pace of being.  

Emotions are simply energy.  When we feel the energy of emotion we liberate fuel.  Fuel for acceptance and change.  That acceptance or change can be of ourselves, or it can be in relation to the outer appearance of our lives.  Change occurring through acceptance, or said another way, change occurring through love, is different than the way we typically try to make things happen.  While there is still intention, vision or goals, there is also more of a listening to the unfolding and participating with it rather than an attempt to push or force to make happen.  While this might seem more apparent for our outer world, it goes for our inner world as well.  Say for example you have a tendency to think you are not valuable or have nothing of value to give.  You could try a million self-help methods to change these thoughts about yourself, go to every class and workshop, and on and on, really throwing everything at it.  Yet when you start with acceptance, coming from love in your attempt to change these thoughts, you don’t insist that they need to be different.  It’s a bit of a paradox, but as soon as we stop insisting something be a certain way or be different than it is, it relaxes and often reorganizes itself.

All the things we desperately think need to be different about ourselves or the world find resolution through acceptance.  The mind can’t grok this and yet it is so.  Acceptance doesn’t mean inaction, rather it means action from love.  To be clear action from love doesn’t mean that our perspective, idea or way of approaching something wins over because we think it’s more altruistic, evolved or better than the alternative perspectives.  This is called righteousness of which our world is rampant with.  Action from love is listening to the inner impulse to move in a particular way or direction, taking action in that direction, and then listening.  Seeing what you feel now and now and now, and following.  When you allow your emotions you see that they guide you moment by moment.  This doesn’t mean that all of your ideals will be met or creations created, but it does mean that you will always be coming from your alignment, from who you are, from what you desire to be, now and now and now.  This is to fulfill your destiny.  It is to be your mission.  It equates to success at all levels of your being.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

HEALING FROM WHOLENESS

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HEALING FROM WHOLENESS 

What is, is

Wholeness is the natural state that exists in each and every moment, yet most all of us are trying to get to it in some way or another.  We conceptually know the complete perfection that is and yet we don’t live from this knowing.  Rather we live from the belief that there is somewhere to get and when we arrive there then completion will be achieved.  Most don’t really know where this place of completion is, but have many ideas that it is in either the attainment or absence of something.  When attainment or absence of the “something” is achieved they think they’ve arrived.  Yet soon the realization of fleeting temporariness of their illusion of completion is revealed and they find themselves back on the search for completion again.

Some people may initially think that if wholeness, completion and perfection already is, then what is there to live for or do.  If you aren’t striving to get somewhere than what?  The thing is that most people ask this question from the place of scarcity or from the perspective of lack of wholeness.  No one asks that question from wholeness because it would be clear to them how to move, where to act, where to be still and how to focus their energy and awareness.  The doubt that they feel about life would be alleviated because they would already know all is well no matter what is done or not done.  

How do we play the game of life knowing that it doesn’t actually matter what happens?  How are we passionate and committed to play and yet simultaneously detached from any occurrence occurring?  How do we heal coming from or knowing that we are already whole?  The definition of healing is remembering or realizing our/the already whole state.  Despite people often believing that healing has something to do with absence or presence of certain sensations or feelings, it does not.  This is again rooted in the idea that there is somewhere else to get or arrive that would indicate completion.  The first thing to really understand is that no matter what the sensation or feeling is that is currently present in your experience, nothing is wrong or un-whole.  Nothing is out of place.  Everything is perfectly aligned including the sensation/feeling experience.  You liking or not liking, preferring or not preferring your experience is not an indication of lack of wholeness.  Yet this is how we base our judgments.  If we like our experience we say all is well and everything is perfect.  If we don’t like our experience we say something is off, we are unwell or things are out of place.  From our view we decide what is, yet what is doesn’t really care about our view.  What is, is, regardless of how we view it.  Is-ness is inherently neutral and complete.  

LEARNING TO PLAY THE GAME

Oh Santa Claus

When you already know wholeness is what is, yet you live in a world environment that still largely perceives that things are wrong, then you must learn to play the game of “wrongness”.  I call it playing a game because once you fully know/believe that nothing can be other than perfect, you see that all you can really do is play the game, because it is no longer real to you that wrong could be.  Let me use believing in Santa Claus when you are kid as an analogy.  As long as your parents played along with the story when you were a kid, then you really believed in Santa Claus.  You put out cookies, you waited for Santa to come and then you opened all the presents he left in the morning.  Nothing seemed unreal about it when you were a kid, that is until you were told the truth.  Once you were told the truth than you couldn’t go back to believing in Santa Claus.  You could only play the game that Santa exists.  You might dress up for the younger kids, help them make cookies and clear the chimney for Santa to come, but to you its just a fun game and there is  nothing serious about it.  There are still things to do, actions to take and ways to play, but you know it’s just for play and that it doesn’t really matter what does or doesn’t get done. All is well.

This is truly what its like to stop believing in un-healedness or wrongness.  What remains is simply the truth of perfection.  You can’t go back to seeing things as wrong, you can only play the game for others that still believe in it.  You take actions, you do things, you change and move things around, yet you know that it truly doesn’t matter because wholeness already is, no matter what you do or don’t do.  You may find that you enjoy certain activities or doing particular stuff so you choose those activities as your play.  Those activities may be doctor, lawyer, coach, therapist, healer, business person, CEO, mom, etc.  This is akin to choosing the activities of dressing up as Santa, versus baking the cookies or going to the store to get milk.  Pick what you prefer or enjoy more.

Similar to the way we wait for kids to grow up a little bit before telling them the truth about Santa, in a way there is also a waiting for people to grow up beyond the belief of imperfection.  There is a time on everyone’s timeline where they will outgrow it.  They can only be told when they are ready to hear it.  If you tell them too soon they might not believe you.  Attempting to get a child’s thoughts, feelings or sensations to change about Santa before they are ready is arduous and nonsensical.  That’s why we play the game instead.  Its fun, there’s joy, and even though it’s ultimately untrue there is still play and activity involved.  As with the belief in wrongness or lack of wholeness, you can attempt to change yours or another’s sensations, feelings and thoughts around it, but if you/they aren’t ready to hear that all is whole and complete, then play the game of imperfection.  Make sure to make it as fun and as ridiculously silly as possible.  Choose to take on doing activities you like doing.  Be free from knowing anything needs to happen or not happen, because after all, all is well, perfect and complete now.  There is no future and no destination where this will be more or less true. Its true now.  This is healing from wholeness, from the destination not towards a destination.  Its playing the game of healing while knowing everything is already whole.

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

LEARNING WITHOUT FAULT

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LEARNING WITHOUT FAULT

There is no self-deficiency in learning

Learning is the natural rhythm of life.  From my perspective everything is learning.  Many of you have heard me say this time and time again.  All too often we get caught up in what is occurring, meaning the content of what is happening and what we think it means, and we forget that there is a bigger overarching learning at play.  We lose sight of the learning and begin to take the content of what’s happening seriously, as if we are going to lose something valuable if we don’t.  We think we somehow need to grasp onto the content, rather than recognize all as learning and not as something to hold onto or keep in place.  As I see it, the intention of life is learning and sharing.  There isn’t anywhere in particular to arrive or any place to get that is better than where we are now.  There is only learning at and in, each stage of our development.  

When we take the content of life seriously and forget that all is learning we tend to live in scarcity, fear, blame, fault and self-hatred.  Our life becomes a series of subtle control and manipulation attempts to make sure that we feel ok.  We compromise ourselves in order to feel safe, and escape from learning because we see it as too threatening to what we have and who we are.  We attempt to hold onto the stuff of our life, particular our identity, at all costs because we perceive threat rather than learning.  When we are confronted by learning, but choose safety instead, we walk with our guards up and defenses engaged, ready to protect ourselves from learning which we perceive as threat.  

When you remember that all is learning you instantly stop creating fault, because there is no fault in learning.  Learning does not imply deficiency, even though we relate to it as if it does.  We believe that if we don’t know or haven’t learned something then we aren’t meeting the mark, something is wrong with us, or we are behind.  We create all kind of stories that we are never going to get it, that we are bad or that no one will love us because we are undeveloped in such or such way.  We traverse the pathway of self-hatred believing that we are somehow not enough or unworthy because of the learning that is presenting itself and that we don’t already know it.  We really must stop and ask ourselves the questions: how did we become so defensive to learning and why do we have such resistance to growth, change and seeing ourselves in novel ways?  When you realize that all of your defensiveness is really just protection, protection from learning, it starts to all seem quite silly.  When the very thing we say we want is healing and growth, and yet we shut ourselves off or down from learning, we find out just how absurd all of our protection really is.   

LEARNING IN INNOCENCE 

All learning is remembering

There is an innocence, a rarified purity, at the core of each and every one of us.  It’s that which is untouched even by our own self-critical and judgmental mind.  That innocence knows only itself and its self is love.  It is the bliss that passes all understanding.  That essence so fully knows itself already because it remains untouched by all of experience.  Yet the you that you currently know yourself to be has been immersed in experience for many, many years.  Experience is content, and when content fills the screen of our awareness we lose sight of ourselves, of the pure, innocent, fully awake being that is who/what we are.  This is not a problem, but it does create the necessity for learning, for remembering ourselves.

How I see it is that all learning is remembering.  We have simply lost focus of ourselves, and therefore we get to have experiences that point us into the direction of remembrance.  Experience is learning, and all learning is remembering.  If you can grok this you can see that learning can never be based in deficiency, but rather only in forgetting or having lost focus of your essence.  There is no fault in this, there is only the game of finding your way back to yourself.  The moment you take yourself or your experience seriously, as something that needs to be fixed or solved, you’ve stopped forward momentum towards your self on the game board of life.  This is often experienced as feeling lost, stagnate, stuck, depressed, anxious, and tense.  

Innocence and purity is what you are.  Bliss and love are the core flavors or your being.  All else is experience/content that is placed on top of that.  Don’t confuse yourself for the content of your life.  Don’t misidentify yourself as the labels you or others have given you.  You are without labels.  This does not negate self-responsibility.  In fact it does the opposite.  It makes you fully responsible to your own remembering of yourself, which is the prime impulse of this entire creation.  The desire to remember ourselves is what drives this entire universe back towards itself, towards its primordial knowing.  This is what is called awakening.  Your remembering, your awakening, is not outside of your reach.  It is inside of experience.  It is the core of all learning.  If you push away learning, or you push away yourself because of learning that presents itself, than you push away your awakening of remembering more of you.  

Learn to welcome learning.  Stay in open invitation to the mirrors that show themselves to you.  They are your allies, your guides, your messengers from you to you.  They will guide you home, to yourself.  It’s impossible that any aspect of life, in its infinite expressions, could ever not be included in the all that is.  That means that all forgetting, all learning, all remembering, all of what we are now, is part of the perfect orchestration of creation.  There is no fault in your forgetting.  There is no fault in your learning.  It is as it should be.  Recognize and play the game.  Have fun.  Embrace yourself as you are now.  Nothing is lost.  All is fully complete and abundant.  Radiate and be who, what and where you are now and for eternity.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

SECURE DESTRUCTION YOU CAN TRUST

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SECURE DESTRUCTION YOU  CAN TRUST

The healing shake up

Earlier this week I was sitting in my car while stopped at a traffic intersection.  There was a large cargo truck in front of me that had the words “secure destruction you can trust” written on it.  I found this to be a very interesting and slightly comical phrase.  As I further looked at the truck it became evident to me that this truck belonged to a document destruction company, which clearly is an appropriate tagline for such a business.  However I also thought what an appropriate slogan for the healing process!  Healing is indeed a process of secure destruction that must be navigated through trust.  

Many people in the general public don’t perceive the destructive or destabilizing aspect of healing.  In fact most look for “healing” because they want more stability or less perceived uncertainty.  Often what these people are really looking for is not healing, but instead something to return them to a previous state of being or functioning that has been disrupted by a set of conditions in their body or life.  Returning to a previous state of functioning is not healing, it is a temporary bandaid.  Its buys you time until you are ready to actually heal.  Healing is a deep remembering of self, of what you are beyond the conditioning, a return to unshakable and undeniable love.  What I have found is that when our life gets shook up in unfavorable ways (what we might term a crisis of sorts) this is prime fertile ground for healing.  In fact little to no healing happens without the shake up.  

You might wonder why do we need the shake up?  Why don’t we just heal without things, including our bodies or lives, needing to fall apart?  The reason is that most people are not motivated in comfort.  When we feel comfortably stable there often isn’t momentum to grow.  When we are in comfort we may not even recognize that there is more to explore, share and know about ourselves.  Also we may not be able to see some of our limiting patterns and beliefs that keep us trapped in boxes inside of our own minds without the shake up.  

So the shake up, the destabilization and destruction, serves.  It serves our remembrance of ourselves, which is our healing.   Its serves by breaking down that which no longer serves.  Even though we often don’t like it and would rather be anywhere else then inside of massive instability, it is required which is why it is present.   When it no longer serves it will no longer be necessary and therefore will not manifest itself, but until then it is part of the way we grow.  One of the main reasons that we suffer inside of the destruction phase of a healing process is because we don’t trust it.  We don’t trust the intelligent process of life and therefore attempt to fix it so that we can return to our previous sense of self and stability.  But what if you aren’t meant to go back to who you were before?  What if you are meant to instead recognize a new version of yourself entirely?  That is after all what healing, growth and evolution is all about.   

CONSCIOUSNESS & PHYSICAL HEALING 

Spirit-matter

Consciousness is a state of wakefulness or awareness.  The brighter your wakefulness or awareness is the more you recognize yourself.  This is healing.  It’s healing because to see, recognize, or remember ourselves aligns our individual perspective with the larger, more encompassing perspective that we are.  We are often looking through this tiny pinhole perspective and extrapolating it to be the ultimate truth of all that we are, when in actuality we are much, much, much more then what we see through our tiny little viewpoint.  The wider our lens becomes, the more inclusive it becomes, the more allowing we are of life and the less we attempt to control and manipulate it.  We learn to love and accept what is just as it is.  This means accepting what we don’t understand, what we don’t agree with, often what we don’t want and discovering that this is what heals us.

One might say that everything in the universe is consciousness.  That all forms that you see, feel and touch are simply awareness.  I find it interesting that there is still a deep non-recognition of this.  We attempt to manipulate forms while not paying any attention to that which is awake, alive and the essence of the form.  We are deeply unaware of ourselves.  Even when we do begin to recognize and metaphorically taste, touch and smell ourselves beyond the forms we tend to externalize or make our essence other.  In fact we put it into this fancy category that we call “spirituality”.  Spirituality or spirit is none other than you.  It is inescapable as you cannot be other than you.  Spirituality is not reserved for some people or some times or places.  It is all that there is.  You could never leave it.  You can only not recognize it.  

Consciousness is not separate from matter.  It is matter.  It is simply vibrating at a slower wavelength than say thoughts or emotions.  Other words for consciousness are awareness, intelligence or information.  Awareness is intelligent.  The more your individual awareness recognizes itself the more intelligent you become.  I don’t mean the kind of mental intelligence that most of us think about as intelligence, though that is included as well, but instead I’m talking about self-organizing, self-healing, self-knowing intelligence.  This is the intelligence that organizes every single detail and moment in the universe.  Call it universal intelligence if you prefer.  This universal intelligence is in total and complete charge.  This intelligence is you.  

This is why all healing is remembering.  A remembering that you are this intelligence.  The focus on consciousness knowing itself turns the brightness knob up.  More brightness means more resourcefulness, more knowing, more intelligent navigating, and better listening and attuning to self.  Seeing and hearing the lessons you are learning more clearly and feeling less like a passive victim of circumstances and conditions.  At first you become co-creator, an active participant in the unfolding of each lesson and moment, until ultimately separation ceases to be perceived and you recognize the one creator as your true identity.  

Forms (including your body) are simply mirrors, pictures, reflections of consciousness, of you.  When you realize this inseparable nature you stop seeking outside of you for a magical pill or answer.  You are the magical pill and answer.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements inside the seeming form mirage that will be supportive to you, as there most likely will be.  But do recognize their function as consciousness illuminators, permission slips or pathways that carve the way inside your own awareness to more deeply know itself and it’s inherent self-healing, self-organizing and self-knowing power.  

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

OPPORTUNITIES FOR HEALING

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OPPORTUNITIES FOR HEALING 

Remembering what we’ve forgotten

There is a tremendous amount of energy and time spent searching, looking and seeking healing.  We typically embark on this search because something inside of us hurts physically or emotionally and/or we know that there is more to life than what we are currently experiencing.  The healing journey is thus the search to somehow feel better and make our experience of life fuller, easier or more enjoyable.  

The thing about the healing journey is that often we seek outside of ourselves to find it.  It is one of those human tendencies to look for things out there rather than inside of us.  As such we expect to find healing in an answer, an insight, another person, a tool, a technique, a being from another planet, something we ingest, something we wear or breathe, a trip or adventure, a relationship, and the list goes on and on.  On the surface we measure success by seeing an external change, meaning our body changes its sensation patterns or a situation in our life shifts.  This is the example of someone who has a particular body symptom or condition whose pattern changes and they exclaim “I’m healed”, or a person that was desiring a certain situation in their life to change and it changed and now they feel whole.  However a sensation/symptom pattern shifting in your body or a situation in your life changing, in and of itself is not an indication of healing.  Not to say these things don’t occur along with healing, but as a stand alone they have nothing at all to do with it.

So what is healing if it’s not a change in external conditions (your body is also a condition) or circumstances, and how is it measured?  A true measure of healing is your state of being or identity.  The most healed state of being/identity is “I am” or just the pure recognition that you exist, nothing else added.  Your state of being informs the perspectives you are looking through.  Do you perceive life happens to you or do you perceive you are happening to life?  Do you feel powerless, like you have to wait for life to change or do you see that you are in charge?  Do you perceive things as right or wrong, good or bad or do you see the absolute perfection in everything?  These are very different perspectives informed by your state of being/identity and a much more accurate measure of “healed-ness”.  

If I was to sum up what healing is with one word I would choose the word remembering.  All healing is remembering.  Remembering who you are, remembering what you are, remembering the perfection of all.  It is quite literally that simplistic.  Yet what that remembering takes and our willingness to accept what we remember is the entire reason healing seems to be a process rather than just occurring in one full swoop.  In and through remembering everything returns to its original state, its original knowing, and all distortion corrects itself.  Said another way, all that was forgotten is remembered so distortion simply cannot be created because distortion is only created by not seeing or remembering the truth.   

INFINITE MIRRORS 

The how of healing

This brings me to how we heal.  For a moment imagine an entire dimension of infinite mirrors.  Everywhere you look all there is are mirrors and you can only see the image of yourself reflected back.  Who or what is seeing the reflection and what does that seer or perceiver project onto the image that it sees?  What gets projected or what you see depends on your perspectives, thoughts and beliefs.  Those are what filter or color the picture or image of you that you keep seeing everywhere in this infinite mirror dimension.  If you pause for a moment you can see that you are in a ocean of your own projections.  Inside this ocean it is very tricky to see anything other than what it is you keep projecting.  However an opportunity arises when one of your mirrors disagrees with what you are projecting onto it.  This becomes the how of healing.  

A healer is not one that does anything in particular to you (because truly that would impossible), but instead a healer is one that provides an opportunity for you to remember yourself as the truth of perfection so that you can align your perspectives accordingly.  The role of the healer is really singular; it is to help you remember.  The healer does this in a few ways.  One way is to disagree or create waves inside your incomplete or distorted projections of yourself.  This creation of waves or insertion of a new image inside of your ocean of projections is your carrot or golden healing nugget.  A moment of clarity.  A lightening of load.  An effortless breath.  Your only task is to accept this new reflection.  It is outstanding how relieving this new reflection feels and simultaneously incredibly ridiculous at how adamantly we refuse to accept it for much longer than a second or two.  However when we can unwaveringly accept this new image (some people call this embody) healing has occurred as we’ve shifted state of being (identity) and perspective.  

Other ways that healers help you remember is simply by resting in the truth of infinite complete perfection and emitting that through all their modes of expression.  Movement, words, sounds, touch, etc.  The importance is not on the expression or the form that it takes but instead on the awareness or knowing from which it comes.  For those that can see, or are open through their hunger to see, will receive that awareness broadcast just like an antenna receives waves.  Its like a meeting or a matching.  Awareness meeting itself through the projection of you and the projection of healer.  It is a transcendence of form and a knowing of the knower of form. Life then effortless moves itself, does itself, and there is no doer of it and no one done onto.

It should be evident by now that healing is an inside job.  No one can heal you.  Healers simply provide opportunities for it.  Healing occurs through you remembering and accepting the truth of you.  A different image then appears on your screen, meaning you see the world and yourself differently.  The projection is simply what the senses can perceive, but it is not real.  You are real, the projection is not, however you can use the projection to mirror yourself back to you.  You can use it as a measure of progress, but remember it is you that shifts not experience.  Experience, imagery, projection, and appearances all respond to you, they take their cue from you.  You heal, you remember yourself and then your body changes, and your circumstances change.  It is also important not to get caught up in trying to make circumstances change through your healing.  When you are truly healed you realize the simultaneity of it all and also that whatever circumstances are arising they are perfect as they are.  You are less concerned about trying to create or make the perfect life or world and instead you are waking up and realizing the already perfect world.  It is through your realizing of it that it instantly becomes lived reality.

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

Body Intelligence

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Body Intelligence

Stress & Acceptance Physiology

There is a natural intelligence to our bodies.  It is clearly evident that our bodies know how to coordinate a zillion biochemical process each day without us even being aware of it.  Modern medicine has barely scratched the surface in understanding the complexity of the way that our body operates and functions.  While it has made advances in looking at the physical components and parts it almost never steps back to see what is the operating force for this physical body in the first place.  

It is obvious that when we cut or injure ourselves that our body initiates a sequence of events to heal the tissue.  Different tissues tend to repair at different rates.  Many of what we label disease processes are the body’s intelligence attempting to recalibrate or heal itself in the best way it can given the situation it finds itself within.  Even when things seem maladaptive to us, meaning producing some kind of symptoms, this is often an intelligent process that is initiated to help adapt and heal the body.  This is also why simply eliminating symptoms can be dangerous as the body created them for a purpose, which is to support homeostasis and healing.  The adaptability and capacity of this body intelligence is really quite astounding and one that we often don’t give much attention to unless it seems to not be working correctly.  

This begs the question as to why it seems that this intelligence fails us at times.  Why does the body not repair after injury or find that perfect balance in its internal processes that we maybe once experienced?  Why does the body’s intelligence sometimes need external or outside assistance?  Lets start with the most significant cases first and work our way backwards.  In the most significant of cases an injury or insult to the body structure is so great that the body’s intelligence can’t reconnect and revitalize that part of the body despite its best attempts to do so.  You might see this with a car accident where there is loss of a limb or a stroke when a portion of the brain dies.  Connection has been severed and the body’s intelligence simply can’t reach or reconnect to that part.  When a part of this body is disconnected from its intelligence source its energetic resource is limited and it eventually ceases to function.  This is what we would call a death process of that part.  When intelligence completely ceases to inform this body structure that is what we call a full or complete death of this physical form.  Again this is the most significant of cases. 

Now at the body level we experience death processes every minute and this does not mean that a portion of the body or the entire body dies.  Believe it or not millions of cells die each second and millions of new ones are born each second.  Unbelievable I know but look it up for yourself.  The death process is actually a very important part of the regulation and health of this body, so much so that I would say that our resistance to a death process occurring is one of the major factors that interferes with our ability to heal.  Wait, what did I just say?  Yep you read correctly.  Due to our often impatience, fear, loss of stability in our body of what once was and wanting to go back to how we felt in our body before a pain or symptom arose we tend not want to let go of what once was.  We thus create a state of resistance aka stress physiology in our body and we are attempting to live in the past which always creates suffering because its impossible to do so.  In this way we interfere with the emergence of the new (which is on the other side of every death) by holding onto the old with the grips of our current idea of life.  When we are unwilling to accept what is, including the potential or actual death of the way that things were, we get stuck.  When we are stuck we desperately seek for some answer or some clarity that will bring us back to the knowing we once knew rather than this new state of uncertainty and instability that we find ourselves in.   

Now back to the body’s intelligence.  The body’s intelligence is always programmed towards health, vitality and wholeness in its actions.  When communication between our body tissues and the intelligence that informs them are intact and not interfered with this information is effortlessly communicated behind the scenes of our conscious awareness and our body functions optimally.  However if this information cannot reach the tissues of the body for some reason then the communication cannot get relayed.  In my opinion and experience the number one thing that interferes with this communication process is us.  Meaning we create the interference in the system through the inner state of being that we are choosing.  Now are there other things that interfere with this communication besides our inner state of being?  The answer is most definitely yes.  Not creating a good physical environment for the body by consuming crappy foods, crappy thoughts and not taking care of the physical body in the ways it needs all interfere.  These things are vitally important to our physical health and vitality, but they are not the entire story.  

The good news is that in many cases reconnection can be re-established.  The sometimes hard to swallow news is that we first have to accept the current-present-now state of our body before that connection comes back to life and our tissues can be re-vitalized.  On a body level this means that we have drop resistance, drop fight/flight mode, drop stress physiology so that the body intelligence can reconnect.  The physiology of stress (aka resistance) blocks physical healing and blocks the communication of the intelligence of the body with the body tissues.  Stress and healing physiologically work in opposition.  On a mental-emotional level this often means we have to stop thinking and start feeling the loss of what was, feeling the pain of not being able to go back, and feeling all of the other difficult emotions that are connected to not feeling or experiencing how you want to be feeling and experiencing being in your body.  

Acceptance physiology is radically different than stress physiology.  It’s the physiology of flowing, communicating, non-interfered with body intelligence.  When we quit holding onto what was, which is embracing the death of what we once knew, only then will we see the new that can emerge.  The clarity that we were so hungry for when we were feeling stuck begins to illuminate our experience.  We can see what needs to be done and take actions accordingly.  We become increasingly ready for whatever we need to do and be.  Our physical body may still be experiencing some symptoms but our relationship to their expression has dramatically changed such that we don’t even really mind that their present if they are.  This is the power of acceptance.  You have this power.  We all have this power.  

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