By Jenny Peterson
So you may have read some of my other blog posts and are now saying, ok Jenny, I’m on board with my illness starting in my subconscious. But how do I find what is in my subconscious that is contributing to my symptoms?
That is a great question and I would like to expand on that “how” today by giving the exact 4 step plan that I take my students through in the Mind Body Rewire program.
These 4 steps not only set the stage for my program but they also simplify the whole process, which as you know that is what I am all about. Keeping healing simple.
I will go into depth with each step and by the time you're done reading this blog, you will know the exact steps you need to take in order to have long lasting healing.
I am super pumped to this blog with you because a common question that I get asked is 'what do you teach in your program?'
What I teach in my program is like no other.
How do I know this? Because I have taken the others! Yes, I have spent oodles of money, just like you, trying all the programs out there. I have done the DIY brain retraining programs and have had the one on one coaching with so many modalities that I can’t fit one more modality in my brain.
It was after trying to piece all of these programs and modalities together that I realized that there were really only 4 steps that are needed to heal.
While some of the programs out there touch on one or two of these steps, they are only a piece of the puzzle. None of them touch on all 4 steps that I address in the Mind Body Rewire program.
By only doing 1 or 2 of these steps that I teach, you will end up with short term success. I like to say that it's half assing it! And I don’t like to half ass anything.
I like things to be simple but effective. I want to create things of quality that last long term. I don’t like quick, easy fixes because they are deceiving and give people false hope. My work is deeply transformational and because of that, it offers long term success.
The primary objective of the MBR program is to guide clients to healing themselves.
I, nor my coaches, do your healing. We are teachers. We teach you the power that you have to heal that is already within you that you are not quite aware of yet .
Ultimately you heal you.
This not only gives you confidence to conquer anything in your life, but also teaches you that you don’t need anything outside of you to heal. This isn’t to say that you need to avoid surgery or procedures or your doctor. It means that you are so confident with your ability to heal that if those things are needed that you go into it with trust.
So let's dive into my 4 step plan to heal chronic illness using your subconscious mind.
STEP #1: LEARN
Now this step might be obvious of what it is, but it's worth expanding on. Because as much as we want to skip this learning step and get to the goodies, I want to remind you that a strong house starts with a solid foundation.
Students often want to cruise quickly through this section of the program because they think they have learned all about the mind by the time they have gotten to this work.
This can often be the case since most people that come to me have tried all options and have already dipped their toes into some type of brain retraining.
Now it's not to say that information isn’t accurate, it just doesn’t go as in depth with the biological understanding of the mind and body that is necessary to understand what is happening with your symptoms.
So, for the first 10 days of the program, we take a deep dive into where illness starts on a biological level. With that solid foundation of understanding where illness starts, we are always able to pull you back to the foundational work when things may come up later in the program.
It's the foundational work that keeps it simple and brings everything back to focus.
STEP #2: IDENTIFY
This is where the fun starts because you can’t fix what you don’t know is a problem.
Even though you think your problem is your symptoms, it's really not. Your symptoms are only messengers of what is going on in your mind. So you have to be a detective to determine what is going on in your mind. Being a detective starts with awareness.
You need to learn what it's like to be you.
The first phase of the identify step is doing some awareness exercises. This includes keeping a notebook near you and writing down your thoughts throughout the day. Most people already know that they have negative thinking patterns, but this exercise takes it to the next level, really putting it in your face.
From doing this exercise you are able to identify old thinking patterns and behaviors. Overthinking, perfectionism, body checking and thinking about your symptoms are some of the most common.
The second phase of the identify step is where we take it a step further of what it's like to be you. Because if you want things in your life and health to change, you have to change what it's like to be you.
We first identify the beliefs that you have about your illness/symptoms and healing. Common ones that I see are “I can’t heal. My illness is incurable. There is something wrong with me.” If you don’t debunk these beliefs they will run the show and all the hard work that you do to heal will be overridden by these beliefs. It's pointless to do any work if you have these types of beliefs.
Next, we tailor the work to your symptoms. Each of your symptoms has a specific biological conflict within your brain. This keeps things so simple and leaves out any guess work. Your coach works with you to help identify the original conflict that happened that is linked to your symptom.
Then we take it a step further by addressing that conflict within your present time, now. Because you can address past memories, but if you don’t change the patterns that you are doing in the present moment that are connected to that original conflict, the cycle will continue.
I’m going to give you an example of what this looks like.
Say that a student has the symptom of restless leg syndrome. This symptom is directly linked to what is called a motor conflict, which means feeling stuck. We would direct this student to identify any memories where she felt stuck just prior to her symptoms showing up.
It can come from being physically stuck, held down, unable to move or incapacitated in some way.
Or emotionally feeling stuck in a job or place you don't want to be, or not being able to escape a place or an uncomfortable situation, being unable to get away from an undesirable living, social, family or occupational situation.
Finding yourself "between a rock and a hard place" or feeling that your hands are tied, forced into a situation.
If a student is unable to identify the event that made them feel that way, we have other ways of finding that, but most people can identify those pretty easily.
From there we take it to the present moment.
What things in your home environment, people, situations make you feel stuck? These are your triggers, also called tracks, in your subconscious. By identifying these you can consciously make different choices when these triggers show up, stopping the “feeling stuck” conflict from continuing.
Next we identify the pay off contributing to your symptoms.
Now this is an area that some people get mad about or don’t simply understand at first. The payoff is all about benefits a person is getting from being sick.
Now you might say… Jenny, there is no benefit to me being sick.
From a conscious perspective, this may feel harsh. But I want you to go back to what I taught you about the subconscious. Remember that it always wants to keep you safe. So if for any reason it feels that getting well is unsafe, then it will stay sick just to keep you safe.
We have specific questions and tools to help identify your pay offs, but one simple question that you can ask to help identify it would be: if I get well what will I have to do that is scary or uncomfortable?
I will tell you specifically a couple of the payoffs that came up for me when I was sick. One of them was the fear of getting well again, doing too much, burning myself out, and getting sick again.
The other was that I would have to get a job that I didn’t like just to bring in money. I didn’t want to work for anyone else, I’ve always been an entrepreneur and working for someone else was something that I wasn’t excited to do.
So I’ll repeat the question, if I get well what will I have to do that is scary or uncomfortable?
Common answers that I see here are:
I will lose my disability payments
I would have to leave my relationship
I would have to have sex with my spouse
I would have to set boundaries with family members or speak up.
This piece of the “identify” step is so powerful and despite how uncomfortable it feels to address, in the end after releasing these payoffs, you are empowered and ready to take personal responsibility for your life.
Next, we identify the areas that are lacking boundaries in your life. This is HUGE!
Boundaries are a big source of our stress and if they are not addressed you will continue the patterns around those lack of boundaries. Boundaries are not only with others but ourselves.
Many people are not taught healthy boundaries. Depending on their childhood they may have been taught that they need to be people pleasers or take care of others before themselves.
The most common students that I have are nurses. When you learn about boundaries, you can understand why nurses eventually burn out from the care that they have given to others and never to themselves. I see this in business owners as well as moms, or people that grew up taking care of their younger siblings or parents. Boundaries can also be influenced by past trauma.
For me, boundaries were a big part of my healing. I have been helping people with their health for over 20 years. In the past, I spent 12 plus hour days at my store working with clients. Never taking the time for replenishing me or even a day off.
I also taught those in my family that Jenny does it all and never said no when they asked for help.
Lastly, I needed to set boundaries with my mom. All my life she had over stepped areas of my life and my choices. I had to learn to stand up for what I wanted and no longer be the child that was afraid to speak up.
Once I set boundaries in all of these areas for myself, my stress and specifically that feeling of being overwhelmed went away. I also felt so free because I was creating my life rather than creating it around everyone else.
The last area of the identify step is around generational patterns.
Now you may ask, what does this have to do with healing? It has more to do with your healing than you think.
The behavioral and thinking patterns that you have today are not just from you. They come from generations before you. Genetics in my opinion have everything to do with the environments that have been passed on to us.
The thinking and behavioral patterns that we don’t even notice are there until you sit back and observe. Have you ever noticed something that you do and then realize that your mom does that too?
Then if you look further, you will notice that her mother does it too? Now if this pattern that you notice is helpful in your life, then there is no reason to change it. But if it's a pattern that is causing stress in your life, then it must be addressed.
These patterns can be about anything.
The way you think about money, the spiritual beliefs that you have, your working habits, the way you communicate with others and so much more. These generation programs can wreck havoc on your life if you don’t change them.
We often think that these patterns that we don’t realize are generational are part of life and we just accept them. But we don’t have to accept them. In fact when you change them, you change the generation after you for the better.
An example that I personally worked on for generational patterns was letting go of control.
I come from a long line of strong controlling women. I realized that this wasn’t working in my life to control other people. It was also a boundary issue, but ultimately I learned both the control and lack of boundaries from my mother. And there was no reason to blame her for that, because she learned that from hers as well. But I was able to identify that pattern and decide if I wanted to have it in my life or not.
As you can see, this identify step is very deep. No surface work here. We are getting to the root of your subconscious patterns.
When students identify these patterns there are so many ah ha moments. They are able to see all the pieces contributing to their illness. Most importantly they are able to see that it's all within them.
Nothing outside of them is causing their symptoms and their body is operating exactly how it's designed based off of the patterns within the subconscious. What is even more powerful is that If they have learned all of these patterns, they can certainly unlearn them. That is where we move into step 3, the release step.
STEP #3: RELEASE
In the release step we give you the tools to release all the old patterns that were identified in step 2.
To put this simply, we teach you how to change your perception.
Your perception is the root cause to your stress and symptoms, so if you change your perception, you let go of the stress. You no longer send a stress signal to your body. Your body then says, hey, that tiger that has been chasing us for 20 years decided to go run down a different road today. It's not chasing us anymore. Then the body says, finally I can relax! And when the body feels safe to relax, this is when the healing phase starts.
STEP #4: REWIRE
This is where you start to implement new thinking patterns, and consciously make different behavioral choices. All from what you have learned in step 2 and 3.
We also incorporate some of the basic rewiring tools that are known like gratitude and visualization. Rewiring is like removing an old computer file and replacing it with a new one. The great thing is that with the new one, you get to consciously create what is on that file.
It's important to keep in mind that the old file had programs that were not your fault. If you would have known the information that you learned from doing this work or even better if your parents would have known this information, things may have been different. But you can’t change that now.
All you can do is make the change within you and by doing that you not only change your life but also the lives of those around you.
This work has a bonus to it that most people don’t know they are getting when they sign up. From doing this work, their relationships change, their marriages get better, their kids no longer get sick and life all around gets better, not just their health.
As you can see, these 4 steps that I take students through is not a cookie cutter program. It's not half assed, it is thorough deep transformational work.
Who you are today and the symptoms that you are expressing can not be changed long term with saying daily affirmations, shoving past memories under the rug, or saying a mantra every time you have a negative thought.
If you want lasting change, you have to do the deep, sometimes uncomfortable work. Every one of these steps is necessary. Healing never comes from being comfortable, being uncomfortable is a requirement to heal.
Our bodies and biology are the same. But our experiences in life and programs within our subconscious are very different from person to person.
What I often see with students that come to me from other programs is that they learn only to stop the stress in the current moment by redirecting their thoughts or calming their mind.
While this works short term sometimes, it doesn’t teach how to deal with stressors in the future or from the past. They may start feeling well but as soon as a stress comes in their life, they are back to having symptoms.
They were given tools to fix thinking patterns in the moment but they never were taught how to manage life moving forward or how to take personal responsibility for the change they want in their life.
These 4 steps that I teach in the Mind Body Rewire program not only transform your health but as a bonus they transform the way you move forward with life after you get well. You won’t go back to those old patterns.
Here is the truth, you don’t want to go back to the normal person you were before.
Those patterns that you had before you got symptoms, got you to this place of “illness". So rather than go back to normal you get to create a new version of you, a better version 2.0!
We get it, you're desperate to have your illness be a thing of the past, not something that defines your days. But trying to heal WITHOUT a custom plan is costing you precious time, money and energy!
You are unique, your symptoms are connected to very specific patterns within your subconscious.
Without a plan unique to you, you will continue struggling and miss out on the life you deserve to be living! To help you get started on your long-lasting healing journey, we would love to provide you with a healing plan that is unique to you. Get your custom healing plan today!
You can also Download my free healing guide, “Why Can’t I Heal” where you will learn the 5 reasons that you haven't healed despite everything you've tried. These are the missing pieces to your healing and the key to resolving your symptoms for good.