Food is not only medicine, it also supports our wellness so we don’t need medicine in the the first place!
In this video, Dr. Li mentions such superfoods as tomatoes, kiwi, and green tea. Watch the clip here, and if you’re interested, get his book and find him online. Health doesn’t have to be hard.
When we find ourselves in a situation where we have failed to voice our opinion, when we are overridden by another whose argument, at the moment, is stronger, louder, or simply seems more compelling than our own, the resulting feelings can be those of grief, shame, and regret.
But if, even in our emotional hangover, we can begin to look at this circumstance from the perspective of Source, and if we believe in Divine right action, then we can move in the direction of shifting our focus.
If we have sufficiently integrated the idea that “the Universe is rigged for our expansion” (Rob Bell), then we might ask with refreshing relief, even curiosity, “Why might this be right ? What will happen next?”
The event or the decision that at first caused our self-deprecation, doubt, and uneasiness, now ascends and merges into the atmosphere of pure potentiality and the abundance and “rightness” of what is to come. Our suffering is a result of believing that we somehow failed ourselves or others; that even though we had all the information we needed to make a decision or a choice, we dropped the proverbial ball. We fell short of the success we so wanted to achieve. But, once we humbly acknowledge that at any given time we only have some of the information, that the Universe is expanding and shifting gears in ways we cannot know, only then can we move from worry or fear or suffering to trust. We can then trust that the pure potentiality, the myriad particles of energy and information that are beyond our conception or understanding, will deliver to us the alignment we most desire.
We don’t need to understand how it will all work out. We just need to trust and know that it will. This is not a Pollyanna, head-in-the-clouds, wishful-thinking approach. No. This is a thoughtful surrendering to the “isness” of our “reality”–a reality that is ultimately shaped by how we choose to see it.
We surrender and then decide to rest in the knowing that the Universe is forging a path towards our further expansion and greatness. And it will reveal itself to us when we are ready to witness it.
You’ve been barking up the wrong tree for quite a long time. It’s time for you to start being nicer to yourself and daydreaming more and being happier about things and giving yourself more leeway and going to more places where you feel good and finding more vistas where you can do more daydreaming and more just giving yourself the opportunity to let your mind be still while your vibration rises so that then you can receive the impulse to put yourself at the right place at the right time to find the things that you are looking for. Abraham Hicks
This rampage is typically full and comprehensive and breathless. It is meant to be. Feel how the energy shifts in the very first sentence, turning us from unwanted towards what is better, preferred, and then optimal.
Refocusing and moving our energy is about changing our perspective. Ultimately, the only thing we need to know is that we can. The only question we need to ask ourselves is, Am I willing to try?
This from Abraham reminds us how it works. Worthiness only comes from one place: going inward instead of looking outside ourselves for solutions, joy, and connection. Unworthiness, fear, worry, anger, anxiety all emanate from a feeling of separateness and living conditionally. As we allow ourselves to take an unconditional emotional posture towards life, we not only gain a sense of worthiness, we also become free.
Have we convinced you that the path to everything you want, which is the past of least resistance, is the path that feels the best? Do you ever hear us say, “Take the path of most resistance?” Then why do you keep taking the path of most resistance?
The path of most resistance is the action path….the trying to convince somebody else or justify. The path of least resistance is just to let it go and trust that it’s alright. It is our wish for you that you will feel and know, feel and know. Feel the worthiness that we know is you.
It is also our knowing that a way for you to feel that worthiness is by finding a subject that you can follow out with resistance-less thought until it manifests. There’s nothing that’s going to give you the knowledge that not only are you the creator of your own reality, but that you can [also] be the deliberate creator of your own reality more than [being able to] find an interesting thought and follow it out and let it please you just because it feels good to think it. And then to witness consciously the things falling into place until it becomes a fuller and fuller manifestation.
That’s how you get your feeling of worthiness. You get it by allowing the goodness that you deserve to flow into your experience under your conscious awareness. Because if good things happen to you not under your conscious awareness, then you call it luck or fate or something that is outside of you, when nothing is outside of you.
But when you tend to your vibration, when you nurture it, when you find something that feels good and you milk it, when you look for positive aspects, when you praise often, when you feel the discord of criticism and so you stop it, when you wake up wanting to feel good and do, when you praise more than criticize and find fault, [this is when you are conscious of your worthiness and you align with your true self].
Regarding people-pleasing, well, at a certain point, there was a time in your life that your life depended on pleasing people. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a compensation. It shouldn’t have had to [be that way]. Ideally, life would have given you circumstances where you would have been accepted and valued for exactly who you were. As a young child, that’s a need of ours. If we don’t get that, we become people-pleasers. And let me tell you….these chronic people-pleasers who suppress themselves to please others, that’s the source of so much physical illness. That pleasing of others and suppressing your own needs to please others actually undermines your immune system. This is science. Gabor Mate with Dhru Purohit
Self-care has been a buzz word for a while. In my opinion, its trendiness has actually done it a disservice. Many teachers have focused on the importance of caring for self and have found many ways of approaching and explaining this essential topic.
My perspective varies a bit from what we often hear in the mainstream. Many instruct us that caring for self is essential, because if we don’t attend to our needs, we will have nothing to offer others. We have all heard some variation of this: We can’t serve others from an empty vessel. But in my opinion, there’s more here to unpack. An ability to care for ourselves must first be predicated on the fact that we love and honor ourselves. Without this foundation and understanding, why would we believe we are worthy of self-care?
And this gets to the heart of Mate’s discussion above. Chronic people-pleasing is an addiction like any other. At a minimum, this behavior leads us to second-guess ourselves and seek approval from others. It becomes a “compensation” for our inability to discern what we want. At worst, the drive to please others becomes a compensation for a much deeper spiritual lacuna: the inability to know who we are apart from others’ affirmations or criticisms.
This addiction paralyzes us. We find it increasingly impossible to make decisions or even state how we feel without worry of judgment. As Mate explains, the suppression of our own desires and authenticity often eventually manifest as physical illness. But, as he reminds us, like all other addictions, people-pleasing isn’t itself the “disability.” Yes, it becomes a “problem”–the focus of therapy and counseling and seemingly the nexus of our own guilt and shame. But it is actually no more the root of the issue than drug addiction or alcoholism. These patterns, propensities, and addictions are always the result of something deeper and systemic: the absence of self-love and thus self-care.
So, what then? How do this acknowledgment and insight inform our greater awareness and deeper consciousness? If we feel challenged to care for ourselves and understand that we are lacking a sense of worthiness and self-love, how do we begin to change this dynamic so that we might live more fully?
This is where a greater awareness in formlessness intersects with our patterns of thoughts and behaviors in form. Only when we understand and integrate into our consciousness that our need for approval, attention, and love began early in life and taught us to seek these essential elements outside ourselves, can we then begin to shift. With greater clarity and compassion for ourselves, we can reassess and change this dynamic. Eventually, we are able to look to the only place true belonging, acceptance, worthiness, and love reside: within ourselves.
Most of us are “looking for love in all the wrong places,” Abraham tells us. We don’t know it exists in ourselves, so we seek it elsewhere. “Do you love me?” we ask others. “Am I enough?” “Are you angry with me?” “What did I do wrong?” “Why don’t you love me?” “Please love me.” Our questions and pleadings are our attempt to seek answers and affirmation out there somewhere. We are constantly looking outside ourselves.
How do we learn to go within and discover serenity and belonging there? Simply by starting. We decide to surrender to this truth: the Divine spark, which is love, resides in us even if for the moment we can’t see or feel it. We give up resistance, arguing that we are not enough, that we do not belong, that we are broken. Instead, we choose to become still and quiet and open our hearts, even just a little, to the more of who we are. We cultivate a loving and caring spirit, allow it to flow through us–through us and to us.
A true sense of worthiness, of feeling that we deserve to love and care for ourselves, only comes from one place: aligning with the truth of who we are, by connecting to beauty, joy, and appreciation, and allowing it to fill us with its energy. Vision boards, mantras, and affirmations are not enough. They are merely superficial and ultimately ineffective if we are not first connected to Source from which all high vibration originates.
It is in this state of alignment that creation expands. It is here that we shed our lack-based need for others’ approval and dwell in the outpouring of connection to self. In this state of wholeness, there is no fear or loneliness or separateness or desperation. There is only compassion and oneness. Here, we reside in the certainty that we belong to ourselves and to the love that holds us in our eternal unfolding.
Having lived (and continuing to live) through my fair share of challenges, which is basically the essence of the human condition, this is what I know. Whether we are aware of it or not, we co-create our every experience, and each one is an opportunity to learn more fully how to see and feel, indeed to evolve. Every interaction with life is an invitation to perceive the world and understand ourselves with greater clarity, depth, and breadth.
All suffering comes from a belief system based on lack and fear. Are challenges certain? Yes. Are illness and death possible and true? Yes. This is life. As soon as we are born, death is inevitable. But every moment we are alive, we have a choice. Regardless of the form life takes, we have the freedom to choose our perspectives and our attitudes.
Only when we can see conditions as they are and detach from them will we be able to discover peace. At any given time, we are able to perceive only a portion of the myriad energies, life purposes, and evolutions occurring around us. Our task is not to control or change others or the conditions in order to find satisfaction and joy. Rather, it is to surrender to what is and allow the natural flow of life-force energy and infinite possibilities to move through and elevate us.
Somehow we have come to believe that contrast and pain are bad things that need to be quashed, eradicated. This is understandable. Emotional and physical pain hurt. We don’t like them. We are intelligent creatures, but our desire to evade and eliminate pain is primal. Our entire system is designed to survive, after all, and pain (and the mere threat of pain) is potentially deadly. But we are more than our neural pathways and our brain. We are spiritual beings first. So our instinctive “belief” (which is in truth taught to us) that adversity is “bad” is actually incorrect. It is misguided. It is a misperception. All creation occurs in the contrast. It is the only place creation happens. Nothing expands without breaking open. Nothing. In denying this truth, we reject our own evolution. Our nature is to crave expansion. But we’ve individually and collectively convinced each other that the pain, the very opportunity to create, is inherently random, unfair, and unnecessary and is to be avoided at all cost.
So what do we do? We repress, medicate, blame, victimize, and argue for our crappy, sad, miserable lives. We say we are debilitated by anxiety and fear. No! We are debilitated by our inability to welcome and allow what wants to be born and express. Anxiety, depression, worry, fear–these are signs of life yearning to move through us, and, because we believe them to be signs of our brokenness, we suppress them. Why do these low but powerful vibrations increase? Because we insist on shutting them up, pushing them down, and arguing that they are the problem. Our spirits want to live. They want to be free. And we protest, claiming our fate as prisoners. We demand the chains are real. So we remain in our emotional cages, for which we blame others, but in fact build and reinforce ourselves.
It’s nothing less than tragic that so many of us argue with nihilistic certainty that it is the prison, not the free spirit, that is real and where we deserve to live. The seduction of the darkness is powerful, indeed. As in Plato’s allegory, even if one finally escapes the shadows and lies in the cave and experiences the light of truth in the sun, the collective insistence on perpetuating the lie is usually so strong that it can do nothing other than destroy the truth and anyone who speaks of it. And so we choose to remain in the cold, fear-based cell of the dark.
We need to know the light is there, waiting for us. Will you choose different?
Until we understand that taking care of our own mental health is neither selfish nor optional, we will continue to live in fight, flight, or freeze. We will exist in perpetual fear, anxiety, and worry.
This is sad for many reasons, but perhaps the worst of it is that we believe we cannot change a pattern that is seemingly imposed on us. In other words, life itself is making our lives impossible.
We declare with certainty and frustration, “None of this is my fault! I’m unhappy, because of COVID, politics, my job, my kids, my lack of money,” and so on.
Only when we can become unconditional in our ability to find ease and joy will we free ourselves of the toxic chaos. This does not mean life suddenly becomes easy or the demands let up. Actually, the external conditions around us probably remain much the same. What does begin to happen, however, is as we are able to shift our energy and focus, we begin to see even the usual challenges of our lives differently.
We decide that life is not doing anything to us, but rather, it is working for us. How? Because we are not seeking change “out there.” We are inviting elevated thoughts and perspectives from in ourselves. And then, so within, so without. It is law.
All creation occurs in contrast, adversity, breaking open. The question is, will we choose to fight against what we are being called to create, or will we flow with it? Will we insist we’re right in all we see that’s “wrong” and thus reject the opportunity to grow? Or will we surrender, release resistance, assume the wings of evolution, and fly?
I made this short video for my kids’ elementary school. I hope it resonates with you, as well.
Sistering to Sophia 