Meditation And Mindfulness Practices

Accepting reality was a point of relaxation for me. As a young man, my father’s family had almost gone under when his father walked away and left. There was a lot of stress around survival, and my father had stomach issues that were partially a result of having typhoid as a kid and partially a result of stress from taking care of everyone. Later, as a new father, my dad stepped up to take care of the family and had a heart attack at an incredibly young age. He was terrified that he’d made a wrong decision that had put the family in danger. After my father died, it was clear it was up to me to make sure the family was safe. The poison in my brain and body was stress from the fear of not being able to take care of my family. When I was stressed, my unconscious loyalty to my father and grandfather targeted my stomach, just like their stress had. I had also had a teacher who told me I would never be able to write well and, of course, teachers are always right! No wonder I wouldn’t believe it when people told me how good my course content was. No wonder every time I had to create new material, I wanted to throw the cats out one window and my computer out the other. Realizing all this, I started to laugh. I am good at helping people work through their own imposter syndrome, and here I was, bang in the middle of my own.

Walk Right Into Your Blessing

I needed these deadly systemic patterns to grow into something else through me. So, what was the antidote? People kept coming back for more because they were transforming, and either everyone else was collectively stupid or I was delivering something useful. Just keep growing and enjoy it. When I tune in, I can talk about this for hours. It was a direct link to what I’d promised about making magic at age nine. When I looked at my body, I had to ask myself, What can you not stomach? And the answer was, Failing to look after my family. So, who did that belong to? My father’s father who walked away from his family. I had those three ancestors to thank for my relentless drive to create safety. But now it was time to relax, enjoy, and work from a space of balance and love rather than fear in ways they had not been able to do. Today, I am often told that people attend my events and classes because they feel safe there, and feeling safe enables them to explore their lives and transform them. It unleashed an excitement to see what I could achieve. And my gut relaxed and transformed from a repository of old fears into an inner compass.

High And Dry

Once I identified the limiting thoughts and feelings, I set about reframing each one of them. Not only did I focus on changing in the moment, but I also worked on changing in the future. I imagined myself teaching at events, feeling loving, relaxed, and playful as I watched others shift. I imagined it so clearly that I felt and experienced myself in the future. By the time I got around to having the medical tests done, all was well with my stomach. You had a lucky escape, my doctor said. I experienced firsthand the power of systemic work and constellations. Meditation and mindfulness practices are wonderful for getting the body to relax in general. When we face dysfunction and illness, it’s not so easy to get the body to respond the way we wish. Have you ever tried telling your body to just get over a headache or a muscle spasm? Tell your body to heal without addressing the root cause and watch it refuse. It knows that something is off, and it’s not about to let you forget either. A kidney or bladder infection is a pretty straightforward message directing your attention to what has you so pissed off.

Why Remind Me?

Stiffness and joint issues point toward inflexibility and stubbornness. The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them by Louise Hay is a tremendous source of insights into the body’s many messages. The sooner you listen and uncover the root cause, the quicker your body can respond and heal. Being willing, aware, and proactive is the key to healing and change. In Nick’s family, everyone was terrified of heart disease. His father took a little better care of himself, ate a little better, and tried to manage his stress. Notice how the unconscious loyalties created a line of inevitability for all the men in the family. Also notice that each subsequent generation of men lived just a little longer than their predecessor. Aware of the pattern and his opportunity to live his life differently, Nick determined, I am not going to meet the same fate as my ancestors. I want to see my children grow up and have children of their own. He saw his doctor regularly and took supplements. He educated himself about cardiopulmonary disease and all the things he could do to have a different outcome, including meditating regularly and visualizing his healthy heart. Now in his sixties, Nick has broken the epigenetic pattern. His children are aware of the family predisposition, but rather than being frightened by it, they use it as a good reason to create a healthy lifestyle. Although medical intervention is important and physical and mental health conditions require professional attention beyond the work we do here, to create a difference in your health, you want to look at your current health and its roots. Does your family system reflect health or illness? Which of the two patterns is more common in your system? Which has the stronger family pull, and how does that affect the family system itself? Is there a pattern of suffering or a deep desire to thrive? What was happening at the time?