By Jenny Peterson

If you look to nature, you can see for yourself that well-being permeates the planet. It’s apparent in plants, animals, the cosmos… and people.
Well-being is the nature of the Universe.
If all healing is self-healing, how come some people heal while others don’t? Are you blocking the inner wisdom of your body to heal itself?
Sadly we are not taught that our body is able to heal or what interrupts the body’s ability to do it.
Healing cannot take place without your consent, collaboration, or at the very least, your cooperation. At some level, there must be a buy-in to your healing or it won’t happen.
Why’s that? Because all healing is self-healing. Healing comes from within. It’s not an external thing that happens to you. It’s an internal thing that happens because of you.
You are in control of your healing.
There is no doubt that your body can heal. But are you blocking it from being able to do so?
Here are my top 7 ways that you could be blocking your own healing.
#1 Your Beliefs
Thoughts are things. Whatever you believe, it is. If you believe you have an incurable disease, you will not heal. If you believe your illness is a blip in the matrix and can be healed, your healing increases. Your brain is always listening.
The placebo effect is real. Beliefs are subconscious messages to your body.
If you believe that good health is only for others and not you, then that is what will happen. If you believe that your symptoms are unique, your situation is different and you are special, this will block your healing. Good health is your birthright. Claim it.
Divorce your labels, they are beliefs. Stating that you have a certain label is claiming it, taking ownership of it. If you claim it as yours, you form an unhealthy attachment to it.
Labels are helpful to understand situations and conditions, but they are not a life sentence. Lose the labels and see them as just information.
Remember how your cuts and scrapes healed like magic when you were a kid? That’s because you had zero resistance about it. If you simply believe that illnesses are messages– and that they can be healed– you’ll open yourself up to allow healing to happen.
Beliefs are powerful, what are you telling yourself about your healing that is blocking your healing?
#2 Not Taking Personal Responsibility
Here’s the deal…… Nobody is coming to save you. It's all in your hands.
Yes there may have been trauma in your life that is most likely contributing to your symptoms. But sitting and blaming your parents, childhood, or other people isn’t going to get you anywhere. As an adult it's up to you to shift these experiences so they no longer continue eating at your soul.
Being a victim is easy.
Taking responsibility isn’t easy or comfortable when you have been programmed this way.
We are actually programmed from the day we are born to be victims. We are at the mercy of our environment. Everything we need for survival- our food, comfort and safety comes from an outside source.
By default we learn that our experiences and feelings are a result of the things that happen to us. People and events or circumstances “make us feel, act, respond or behave the way we do. We have no control, so it's “their fault.”
We are not taught that the controls are within us. So when chronic symptoms happen to us or shitty situations, we never choose to look within, we always look outside of us.
Being a victim means we give our power to others, we get our value from others, and we can’t help but feel we are victims of circumstance.
When you step out from being a victim to being a victor, you will see your health and life change. Victors understand that the real cause of problems is perception. Its the meaning you are giving your experience that makes our problems.
This kind of thinking puts the power back in you. You get to choose how you live and you can make your life what you desire.
When it comes to chronic symptoms, observe where you are playing a victim. Are you telling yourself that you don’t have a choice, do you feel like others are making you feel a certain way? These are some behaviors that come from a victim mindset.
#3 Your Language
Your words are blessings or curses. Your brain and body are listening to what you say and responding to how you think.
Instead of asking, “Why me?” ask empowering questions like, “What’s the message here for me? What’s the lesson wanting to emerge?”
How often are you talking negatively about or to your body?
How often are you saying the words “I can’t”?
Are the conversations that you have with others always about complaining about something or your symptoms?
Start to shift how you talk.
It is the easiest place to start because you can hear yourself when you talk out loud. When you catch yourself talking in these negative ways, you can stop and change the subject.
Once you have that down, you can do the same with your inner thoughts. Those take a little more persistence because they are running on autopilot. But with patience and persistence you can break those negative thought patterns. For more help with this, I suggest you listen to episode #51, 5 Ways to Stop Negative Thoughts.
Your language is important. Slow down and listen. Observe, become aware. That is the first step to making changes.
#4 YOUR FOCUS
Why most people don’t solve their problems:
They are laser focused on their problems & what they don’t want!
The strongest driving force in the universe is PAIN, or what you don’t want.
People focus so much on what they don’t want that they become experts at producing it.
We are designed to pay attention to what we don’t want- its how our brain was designed for survival.
Wherever the mind goes, the body follows- when we’re focusing on what we don’t want, our subconscious keeps looking for proofs to support it.
When you focus on not wanting to feel like poo, missing out on traveling with your family, never being able to be normal again, you are literally programming yourself to attract exactly this.
Shift your focus.
Imagine yourself well.
See yourself healthy.
See yourself free of all this cumbersome attachment that keeps your world small. Play in the Disneyland of your mind and visualize you at your best, most healthy self.
The imagination is the portal to all things manifested. It all starts there!
Visualization is you telling your brain what you want! You’ve already been using it most likely but in the wrong way.
Your brain has millions of networking neurons. Within those neurons are your beliefs, feelings and perceptions that have been programmed throughout your life.
If you want something to change in your life then you need to rewire those neurons by creating new networks of neurons. Visualization does this!
Shift your focus to what you want instead of what you don’t want and you will start to see things unfold in your life as if it was magic.
#5 Obsessing about symptoms
When I was “sick” I woke up thinking about my symptoms, I did research or did protocols all day long to fix them and went to bed thinking about them.
I was obsessed. I figured the more I focus on them, the faster I will heal.
Boy was I wrong.
All I was doing was feeding the fear cycle in my brain and keeping my nervous system on high alert. Which was just keeping me in a conflict state, which doesn’t support healing.
We can’t heal when our brains are constantly “on”, thinking about symptoms.
Symptoms, as I have said many times, mean that you are healing. The intelligence of your body needs you down and out of the way so it can do its job and regain alignment. This means you need to stop thinking and obsessing about your symptoms.
The body simply can’t heal if the mind is not at peace.
We have a tendency to view symptoms as something terrible when in fact they are the outward signs of our bodies working to heal us. Many people fight symptoms or try to eliminate them altogether. This only blocks or slows down their own healing. They have introduced resistance to the equation. The best thing to do is to surrender to the symptoms and where you are at, unless it’s life-threatening, and ride the wave.
For me, surrendering was about accepting that this was where I was at. My symptoms didn’t kill me so far, so I could let go of the control, knowing that I have always made it through. I had to build trust with my body, knowing that it was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
When we obsess about healing or really anything, its about control. When we control, it makes us feel safe subconsciously. But really we don’t have any control, it just feels that way. The opposite of control is trust.
To let go of obsessing about your healing or symptoms, you must learn to trust both your body and you.
This is why the focus for healing needs to be stepping into a 2.0 version of yourself, shifting the way you respond to life, building trust in you and loving you. When you focus on creating this new version of you, the focus is no longer the symptoms. Then the symptoms feel like they magically disappear, they are like the cherry on top.
Because like I mentioned, the body heals when the mind is at peace. That peace starts when you no longer respond to life in ways that feel like a threat.
Where is your focus? Is it on your symptoms or on creating a 2.0 version of you?
#6 IGNORING YOUR BODY’S HEALING REQUIREMENTS
Yes, in order for your body to heal it requires your mind to be at peace. But we can’t forget about the basic requirements needed by your body to support the healing process. This includes sleep, nutrients, movement and water.
Now don’t fast forward this and think “bla, bla,” I’ve heard this all before. Yes, you may have heard these things before but maybe not from the perspective that I’m teaching it.
In addition, most people with chronic illness are high achievers. This was me as well. When you are a high achiever, you realize its noon and you haven’t eaten breakfast or even drank a glass of water. You're so focused on “doing” and the next thing on your to do list. This can also be said for those that are obsessed with healing as well. You get so caught up with researching, scrolling, etc that you forget to drink or eat. I’ve been in both places, the high achiever and obsessing about healing and the basic requirements of the body often got neglected.
Remember that healing takes place in the parasympathetic nervous system. Sleeping is when this system is activated. In addition to making sure you’re sleeping, it's best to go to bed by 10pm. The reason for this is because the longer you stay up past dark, the body is going to adapt internally. Your cortisol levels are going to go up just to stay awake when you are technically supposed to be sleeping, which in turn will activate your stress response in your body. Any time your cortisol is increased, you are activating the sympathetic nervous system, which is not where healing takes place. Your sympathetic and parasympathetic can’t be activated at the same time, its one or the other.
So remember this when you are scrolling at midnight in your bed or binging a netflix series. Are these things really more important than your healing?
Next is hydration. Your nervous system is an electrical system and water is the conductor. When you’re not drinking enough, your brain’s functions are impacted. Your brain is struggling to perform at the level it was designed to function, and water is essential for that.
Your brain depends on two substances: glucose and water. But of the two, water is more efficient.
Water is best at helping the brain’s cells get the electrical energy they need to perform optimally.
Water is also best at helping your body produce enough hormones and neurotransmitters. In fact, half of your brain’s energy is spent sending and receiving signals through your nervous system.
When you’re fully hydrated, your brain will perform at its best which is extremely important when doing subconscious work.
A lot of people think they are getting enough water daily but when they count how much they really drink often they fall short. Make sure you are drinking half your body weight in oz. Measure this out at the beginning of your day and make it your goal for it to be gone by the end of your day.
When it comes to exercise, yes you should be moving. Just simply to keep your body strong and your lymphatic system moving. But by movement, I do not mean HIIT classes or running.
When someone has chronic symptoms, their nervous system is heightened. Fast, high intensity exercising will increase this. It will also increase your cortisol, which in turn has a domino effect on your endocrine system.
The best exercise during your healing is walking at a pace where you can have a conversation and for no more than 30 minutes, yoga (not hot), tai chi, chi gong or any other slow movement exercise.
Now if you are not doing anything like this or feel like you can’t, I want to challenge you. You don’t need to do 30 minutes of yoga starting tomorrow. You can build yourself up. I started with just 5 minutes of tai chi when I was sick. I increased that time every couple of weeks until I was able to do 30 minutes.
When it comes to food, your body requires protein to heal. So I’m not going to tell you what you should be eating because that opens a whole can of worms, but I will tell you that you need to be eating at least 30 grams of protein per meal. Don’t skimp out on meals, eat 3 times a day.
If you have chronic symptoms you are not in a place where fasting is ok. Your body needs nutrition to heal. Fasting will only increase the cortisol levels which are already elevated with chronic conditions. This is also very important for women with hormonal issues.
Like I said, this is basic information that you have probably heard already. But if you are like most of our students, a person that is making healing a full time job or “doing doing” all the time due to that high achieving pattern, or a person that is putting self care last, then most likely you are neglecting these very basic needs. Our minds are preoccupied with other things and we form these bad habits of putting these essential needs to the side.
So check in with yourself, are you meeting your body’s basic healing requirements?
#7 DIY-ING YOUR HEALING
I’m a natural problem solver. I love the challenge of trying to fix things or make situations better. I am a very independent person and asking for help was really never my thing.
In the beginning when my chronic symptoms first started, I was no different. I was bound to figure it out on my own. I bought the books, did my own research and created my own healing protocol. After all, my belief at the time was no one else could do this better than me. I was not what you call “good at delegating” or even setting boundaries around what I decided to take on, even for my own health. Heck I didn’t even know what boundaries were!
Then it worked until it didn’t work. I became exhausted trying to figure it out. Overwhelmed with all the information I was reading and all the different recommendations that are out there. It was at this time, that I remembered something that I learned a hard lesson in business with in my previous years. That I was my own bottle neck.
What this means in business is that the owner is the bottleneck because they are doing too many things and are often not handing off tasks that are not moving the needle in their business. They are the ones that are getting in the way of their business growth, often due to a fear of delegating and letting go of control.
This was me but instead of it happening in my business, it was now happening in my healing.
I was my own bottleneck.
So I let go of my belief that I needed to figure everything out on my own and decided to get help. Now that journey in itself , as you probably know, can take you in many directions. But what I will say is that with each person that I went to for help, it took me to the next step in my healing. Not because what they recommended helped, but it was kind of like I checked that box, on to the next thing. Yes I started with holistic practitioners and functional medicine, I even went to the medical world which was completely against who I was, but I was desperate and willing to try anything.
What I will say is that I always listened to my intuition with each new thing I tried. I finally met a practitioner that said, “Jenny, all the answers are within you, the problem is that you can’t see them right now.” She explained to me that my own filters were preventing me from seeing what I needed to work on within me.
In fact, she pointed out to me a pattern that I clearly wasn’t seeing on my own at that moment. I said you're right, I would've never seen that because I honestly don’t even know what I’m looking for! That’s when I decided to hand over the process of finding my subconscious patterns but it was my job to change them and take new actions.
While I agree and teach that all healing is self healing and comes from within, trying to do that without outside help is blocking your healing for the simple fact that you can’t see your own poo.
Honestly, it is wasting more time and energy thinking that you can do this alone. I’m going to compare this to my years of business experience again. In the past, I would be offered help in my business and my stubborn 20 year old self refused it and said that I could figure it all out myself. I lost that business because of my stubbornness to not let go of control. Nowadays, delegation and working with coaches is like second nature to me. I hate having to waste time, I would rather use it efficiently. Learn from someone that has done it, rather than spend time trying to re-invent the wheel.
If you are resistant to working with someone to help you with your subconscious patterns, take a moment to feel into what belief system is behind that. Do you need to have control? What fears do you have about working with someone? What meaning are you giving this opportunity to take the next step in your healing?
This concludes my list of the common blocks I see in those that are trying to heal their chronic symptoms.
Lets review the 7 again:
Be honest with yourself, are you doing any of these? If so, that’s ok, this isn’t about beating yourself up or shaming you. You are human and these are very human behaviors because of our lovely brain.
Acknowledging where you are is a great starting point. Determining if where you are is what you want or you don’t want is the next step. If you like where you are at, then there is nothing to do.
If you don’t, then taking action to shift these patterns and choices is the next step.
Myself and the MBR team would love to help guide you step by step to let go of these patterns, which in turn will assist your body to heal and help you get your life and health back.
Jenny Peterson is the founder and CEO of Mind Body Rewire (MBR). She teaches those that are overwhelmed with trying to heal chronic symptoms how to simplify their healing by focusing on just one place, the subconscious mind. Learn more about MBR here.
Comments