You’re not good enough. This is the message we are barraged with daily from all media outlets, told that we have to live up to a standard that only photoshop can achieve. Though we consciously know these are unrealistic standards that no one can live up to, the sheer volume and consistency of these kinds of messages ensures that a sense of inadequacy sinks deep down into our core. We feel that we are broken and need to be instantly fixed by things like pills or surgery.
This constant need for instant gratification that is never sufficed leads to addictive behavior. For some people it is alcohol or cigarettes, for others it is sweet treats or coffee, for others it is shopping or gambling. These industries thrive because we are so distracted from the goings on of our own body that we constant seek external energy boosts. However, we have within us the ability to experience the same kind of energy, without any crash or constant desire for more.
On the healing journey, it is easy to slip into the pattern of trying to “fix” everything that is “wrong” with us. But it is important to remember that your body is perfect and everything that it has done is a necessary response to protect itself from stress. Often, excess weight is the storing of toxins in body fat or water that it doesn’t currently have the ability to safely detoxify. Instead of trying to restrict our body’s nourishment, we should reduce its toxic load and support the detoxification systems. Any negative emotion we express toward our body takes us away from the direction of health.
Feeling is healing
This is the key. Since our body is perfect, we don’t have to actively change anything, and to try and do so would be to deny the perfection. Instead, all we have to do is turn our attention inward. Pain is just our body trying to tell us that something is wrong. Once we have acknowledged the pain and taken action to reverse the cause, there will be no more need for it, and on its own it will melt away.
Though we tend to think of our body, mind and emotions as separate things, the entire human is an interconnected network. Often physical pain is the manifestation of emotional pain, or a physical tightness or inflexibility can cause a rigidness of thought. As we venture down the feeling path, it is normal when releasing tension to experience powerful emotions or feelings as well. It is important to just let these flow through you and just feel them as they pass.. There may be no deep rhyme or reason to your tension or pain, and it doesn’t help to make one up; remember feeling is healing and after you feel, you need only feel more.
It may be difficult at first, but the goal is to live your life from this state of feeling as opposed to thinking. It’s not that thinking is negative, but rather the true extent and depth of the body’s senses exceed the capabilities of the mind. In other words, tuning into feeling makes your more aware and sensitive to the true nature of what is happening around you. It is also a more efficient way of using bodily resources. The brain is the most energy intensive organ in the body, so it’s a good idea to give it a break every once in a while.
So how do you actually do this? See my Introduction to Feeling Meditation
 
 

 
Introduction to Feeling Meditation
It really helps to have a practical exercise in which to experience what I mean by feeling. Starting by sitting in a comfortable position, either at the edge of a chair or on a cushion on the floor with legs folded.
Lengthen your spine by sitting straight, slightly tucking the chin, sending the tailbone downward and sending the crown of your head to the sky. Imagine you are creating a straight line that starts from the center of the earth and extends all the way through your spine and comes out your head into the sky.
Become aware of how this body position affects your clarity of mind. Now gently close your eyes and tune into the breath. Imagine that with each in breath you are drawing it up your spine along the line we created and with each out breath, send the breath back down into the ground.
Your mind may begin to wander and that’s okay, when you notice it, just become aware of the thought and then gently guide the awareness back to the breath.
As physical discomfort or pain arises from holding this position, this is the key time to tune into feeling. Imagine you are an alien inside of a human body for the first time. Every sensation is new and exciting. When the pain or discomfort arises, explore it with childlike curiosity. Lean into the sensation and feel it fully. Tune into the pulse or breath of that area of the body. What would it feel like to have more space there? To let that stagnant energy flow?
Even just doing this exercise for one minute can change your perspective. 

​When people experience health challenges, it is a common rationale to blame any discomfort or difficulty on genetics. Not only does this shed any personal responsibility for the problem at hand, but it inherently eliminates the potential to change things for the better, because they were “just born that way”. This is a relief to the mind because then it doesn’t have to tackle the difficult issues of addressing underlying patterns that cause the problem. Therefore, no one has to go through the discomfort of doing things differently, and confronting difficult emotions or situations.
Luckily, the new science of epigenetics is here to dispel these myths. Epigenetics is the study of how genes are activated in our DNA. We may be born with a certain set of genes, but some will be completely inactive within us at any given time. Here, it is the immediate environment that controls who we are. Radical changes and adaptations to an environment don’t happen gradually over countless generations, but happen within one, two or three generations. When looking at centenarians (people who live to be more than 100), scientists have found that these people do indeed have certain genes that increase disease risk and early death. What allows these people to live so long is that those negative genes are turned off and rendered inactive
A great example of the power of epigenetics in humans comes from a study of 200 years of harvest records from a town in Sweden. There was a distinct correlation between the food abundance during one generation and the incidence of disease in following generations. In other words, if a grandfather experienced famine before they went through puberty, his children and grandchildren were less likely to develop diabetes or cardiovascular disease. The theory is that if the grandfather experienced an abundance of food during childhood and overate, this would activate certain genetic markers that would then be passed down to his children and grandchildren.
New findings in epigenetics suggest that our genes can be switched on or off on minute a minute to minute basis. Every part of our environment can affect them, whether it’s the constant, low-level stress of modern life, the genetically-modified foods that make up the bulk of the American food system, or the excessive electromagnetic frequencies being emitted from our cell phones and wifi routers. The concept of epigenetics is relevant to all living things, but humans have a unique characteristic that makes epigenetics particularly important for us to recognize.
Humans have to ability to form complex thoughts. Many people don’t realize that these thoughts are also part of our environment. Your body can’t tell the difference between a stressful morning in traffic and the threat of a tiger lurking nearby. It only feels the reverberations of your thoughts. While this may be a surprising or overwhelming initially, this is ultimately the key to freedom:
A thought can change your DNA.
What this means is we have to take responsibility for the world we create, not only externally but internally. Most of what we experience is a result of how we have lived our lives up until this point. If for some reason, your experience is not what you would like it to be, it is no one’s fault but your own, and you have all the power in the world to do something about it.
Change is inevitable, what we do have influence over is the direction of that change. This influence isn’t optional, but inherent to the way our body functions. If you choose to ignore your power, you will create a life of ignorance and powerlessness. However, when you take control of how you think, feel and act, there are no limits for the abundance you can create in this world.