Shifting the Conversation from Illness to Healing

I’m ready! The time has come for shifting the conversation. We all have two or three primary themes in the stories we tell ourselves and others. While they may get loosely rotated, these themes are constantly on repeat. Over and over again we tell ourselves and others the same thing. In doing so, we reveal our beliefs and shape our behaviors. Sometimes these conversations turn stale and keep us from growing.

The Power of Thoughts

Thoughts become things. Our minds are incredibly powerful creators. What we believe becomes. Opportunity and possibility always exist. These two bedfellows are only one thought away. What we allow has the freedom to move into our lives. What we resist struggles to find inroads.  Similarly, our choices inform how others relate to and interact with us. We tell them what’s important to us by the conversations we choose to have with them. 

In choosing, we determine how we see the world. We decide whether life is happening to us or for us. Our conversations reveal whether we believe others are against us or with us. But even these choices are a trap of either/or. Life is about the And. We need to be more fluid in our choosing; in our believing. It’s time to increase the scope of our conversations; the flexibility of our themes. The complexity of life and human nature requires us to let go of the ego’s absolutes.

Shifting from Fear to Love

The ego is hungry to dissect the world into opposites and absolutes. Eager to keep us safe from a perceived dangerous world, the ego encourages us to see ourselves and others through the lens of fear. We are good or bad, weak or strong. Others are for or against us, threatening or supportive. But what if we choose to move beyond the ego? As humans, we can’t merely discard the ego, but rather must accept its fearful nature and choose not to buy into it. Instead, we elevate our thinking to a place centered in love, hope, and possibility.  We change the themes that emphasize our separateness from others to ones that recognize our collective oneness. Indeed, we are all one; connected by the energy of Source. As creatures of habit, shifting the conversation is easier said than done.

Intentional Conversations

Certainly, most of us don’t wake up and say, “I’m going to talk about this life theme today.” But why not? All this asks of us is to raise the consciousness of our choices. Imagine the power of spending 5 minutes each morning getting centered on your intentions for the day. Intentions about how you want to show up in the world and interact with others. Then, maybe you spend another 5 minutes at lunch checking in your intentions; reaffirming, recalibrating. Finally, at dinner or bedtime, you celebrate your successes. As you do this, you build the habit, raise your consciousness, and integrate a new expression of yourself and your beliefs.

Shifting My Conversations

There are times in our lives when we know it’s time for shifting the conversation. We must expand or replace our themes and step into our becoming. For me, I feel the time is now. Over the past two and a half years, a major theme has been illness and recovery. And rightly so. My life has been consumed with figuring out what the hell is going wrong in my body and brain, finding practitioners to help, and following through on the treatments intended to help my recovery. And, of course, there have been the emotional and spiritual conversations as I have moved through the terrifying chaos of crisis and the heart-wrenching pain of loss and grief into the soothing arena of acceptance and release. Acceptance of what is and release of what no longer serves me. 

Now, I am moving more deeply into the zone of healing and thriving. Actually this whole journey has been about healing. And even early on, I found ways to achieve what I call a modified thrive.

Each step along the way has been about choosing the becoming; allowing myself to shed the layers holding me back from growing. I’ve had to choose over and over to release the past; let go of my understandings and expectations of myself based on who I used to be, what I was capable of. This is the non-physical healing that bolsters physical transformation.

The modified thrive is not a reflection of the miraculous healing of my body, but rather of my mind. The miracle lies in my decision to be happy and grateful for life; my incremental healing, the resources available to me, my incredible support system, and so much more. Honestly, it is nothing short of a miracle that I have come as far as I have physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually since I first got sick.

Moving from Illness to Healing

I am shifting the conversation around my recovery from illness and struggle to healing and thriving. I refocusing my primary themes to center around love and gratitude, happiness and hope. Truth be told, my conversation with myself has long had this focus. These themes are what pulled me through the darkness. They helped me transition from loss and grief into acceptance and release. It is through acceptance of where I was that I could move towards who I wanted to be.

Then again, hope, a future-based belief, has long been tenuous; visible but just beyond my fingertips. The success of acceptance depended on staying present; releasing laments about who I no longer was and fears of who I never would be again. Thinking about the future was dangerous. I didn’t know what possibilities I could trust. As soon as I would get my hopes up, they would get dashed by another flare-up of my illness. My connection to hope was strong enough to keep me progressing forward but fleeting enough to make me skittish of discussing it with others.

Shifting with Others

So, it’s in my conversations with others that I need to shift. I’m ready to move beyond a future based on the fear of the unknown and shift into one centered on the hope of possibility. I want to share my joy and gratitude. I want to talk about what may be. My giddiness with the wonders of the world and the gifts of life beg to be shared. As I lean into these thoughts and beliefs, I reinforce them. I am choosing to raise my consciousness and set intentions based on love and our collective oneness. In choosing the shift, I am making space for new conversations. I am opening up to my own possibility and that within my interactions with others. Although I am still a bit scared to trust in the future, I can’t wait to see what will unfold from shifting the conversation.