Each of us has a relationship to pain, conscious or not.

Whether you see it as your friend or foe, pain has helped you grow, and taught you important lessons. Pain is a familiar experience in life. It's never fun when you're going through the thick of it, but pain can be a valuable ally when you create a more conscious relationship to it.

Being in a body can sometimes be a painful experience. Emotions, including pain, are the language of the body. You can learn compassion from feeling your own wounds, and also from witnessing and validating the feelings of others around you.

When you choose to believe in yourself, you’re ignoring the status quo that says you require approval from others in order to proceed with your belief in you.

Following the rules (someone else’s rules) isn’t on your agenda. Your spirit is self employed, and you’re following your internal truth. You’re not taking memos from others. You evolve this way, just by choosing to believe in you.

A belief in yourself is a positive ‘yes!’ to your spirit and its ability to move you in your life. Trust and faith are present and working their magic

Have you considered that following your heart is a gift to the rest of us?

If you’ve been of the mindset that taking care of yourself first, and listening to your own true desires is selfish and unrealistic, here’s some good news for you. When you listen to what you want and follow your own internal guidance system, you will create a happy and fulfilled life for yourself.

You'll be living in your own truth, and be able to become who you are here to be.

Is it you who gets to decide that you have value? Have you been waiting for others to see it first?

If you allow your value to be determined for you by the judgments or standards of others, you may want to rethink this choice. Yes, this is a choice, even if it’s an unconscious one.

Somewhere along the way, you gave up ownership of your self worth to someone or something else. Your family, society, teachers, culture, group, or even your friends might be the ones you allow to decide your value for you. If you haven’t been feeling good about yourself lately, and nobody around you is very validating to you, perhaps you need to reclaim your value for yourself.

This week’s healing tip: learn to give yourself the gifts of self-love, acceptance, and kindness, daily.

There is no healing substitute for self love. No other energy coming from anywhere or anyone is as powerful as the energy you give to yourself. Your attitude towards yourself matters.

You don’t have to prove it or earn it, but you deserve your own admiration and appreciation just for being alive. Especially if you are prone to bouts of self flagellation because you’ve made mistakes, or didn’t get enough items checked off your make-believe to do list, or somehow feel you’re not worthy.

You already have what it takes to help heal the world you live in.

You can create healing on this planet. The trick is to begin with yourself, and do your own healing from within. You are not responsible for healing the rest of us, and you don’t have the power to decide who heals.

All healing is self healing, which means that others heal from within themselves too. You can never do someone else’s healing for them, because it's not your job. However, you have an important effect on how and whether others choose to heal themselves. You might be unaware of the power you possess to do this.

Is there anything better than feeling well, happy, and enthusiastic about your life?

Is good health worth more to you than money, power, or prestige? Financial wealth doesn’t guarantee you’ll be healthy, and it’s difficult to enjoy it freely if you’re not feeling well, isn’t it?

It all begins with energy, spirit. Good health, illness, enthusiasm, joy, happiness, depression – all begin with energy.

Your commitment to your spirit is the most important commitment you’ll ever make.

You are the one who is in charge of your own spiritual growth, and it’s your personal business as to how you choose to grow. Your spiritual growth leads to all other growth. You get to decide what this means for you, and how you will go about having it.

It’s important to remember that you can’t do this for anyone else.

You already are one of a kind. All you really need to do to be different, to stand out in a crowd, is to be yourself.

This works even better if you can also love who you are, and own your own self image. ‘But who am I?’ you may well ask yourself, "can I really be myself?".

It’s your job to find this out. Along the way, others will attempt to help you do this, by telling you who they think you are. Most of them don’t really know, because nobody knows you better than you know yourself.

When you’re on a journey of self awareness and discovery, it can be all too easy to focus on the places you have gotten stuck in your life.

When you begin to dive into the work of knowing who you really are, you come face to face with all of the things you’ve tried and failed to be. That's the perfect time to take a self validation break, and remind yourself how far you've come.

While you’re in the middle of intense new growth, it might take everything you have to keep moving forward. If you get caught in what isn’t working, what you’re missing, or where you went wrong, you’ll forget to validate what went right.

My first fight with a doctor happened when I was 19 years old.

My mother took me to this doctor because I’d received a diagnosis of dysplasia, which is considered a pre-cancerous condition. An RN who worked at the University of Chicago hospital at the time, my mother rather predictably freaked out at my diagnosis, which is why I didn’t want to tell her in the first place. However, I was smart enough to know I needed her help with this, so I included her.

She chose a well respected specialist in gynecology at the U of C, and off we went.

When everything in your world seems to be unraveling, it’s not easy to see how healing is taking place.

If you’ve held tightly onto what has been, to the things you thought were real, it’s even more painful when those things begin to fall apart.