Learning to heal yourself is a skill worth developing

Consciously choosing to heal yourself helps you create healing within.

You make choices every day of your life. At a certain age, you learned to choose what you would wear each day, and to dress yourself. You became more self sufficient, not needing anyone else to tell you that you needed shoes and socks on your feet. You began to have an opinion about what clothing you put on your body every day.

When you were old enough, you may have helped your family to prepare food. Being able to feed yourself was seen as a good skill to develop, one that you'd certainly need when you became an adult and had to take care of yourself. Your opinions about cooking and eating were mostly formed at a young age, based on your family's habits and beliefs. It's exciting and validating to learn how to cook, to have another choice available to you that can create health. Food choices have a lot to do with how healthy you are.

Every time you learned something new, developed a new skill, or tried something different, it began somewhere with a 'what if?'.

What if I try something new today? What if I sign up for that writing class? What if I stretch myself outside of my comfort zone? What if I explore a plant based diet? What can I lose by learning something new?

What if you were to decide to learn how to heal yourself? What is healing for you, Can you have healing experiences, and make choices for yourself that help you to heal? Your healing begins within you. You can heal because you decide to heal, and no one else can decide this for you. No doctor, no healer, no surgeon, can ‘make’ you heal. Each can help you along your path to healing, and thankfully there are many healers and healing modalities to work with. But none has the power to choose your healing for you. That is your job alone.

If you give yourself the permission to do so, you can change what you know about healing. If you ask yourself questions along the lines of "will this be healing for me?" and "how do I heal myself?", and then listen to the answers, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that you often know what you need to do, in order to be well. Very importantly, your body also know what it needs. If you make a habit of listening to your body, instead of judging it, ignoring it, or being angry at it, you'll learn what your body needs to be happy and well.

Many people have a picture that they don't know how their own bodies work.

They're not the experts of their bodies, and believe that highly trained authorities should choose for them. They become helpless when something strange happens with their body, meanwhile not listening to their own body's pleas for better food, more rest, or exercise. They may consult every expert available, except for the most important one - themselves.

Good healers and medical practitioners are wanted, valuable, and necessary. But not one of them can do your work for you. When you become the expert of yourself and your body, you'll find it easier to seek out the kind of care you really need. If you listen to yourself and your body, you'll naturally become much more of an expert of yourself.

Because it makes it easier for you to listen to your own knowing and your body, meditation is a valuable self-healing tool that will assist you along your healing path. If self healing is something you want to add to your list of skills, begin by giving yourself quality time to work and play with your spirit, and get your meditation practice on.

"Most people know more about what's going on under the hood of their car than they do about what's going on inside of their own bodies."  -Liz McDonald, yoga teacher, healer, physical therapist

• ©Kris Cahill
  'Golden Reflections' ©Karas Cahill