When I was regularly seeing clients, it became clear to me that all my patients had to improve the way they took care of themselves. That meant they each had to take a lot of responsibility to follow through in all the different areas of self-care they needed. They had to reprioritize their lives to put themselves and their health first. To do this takes a great deal of effort, because usually they gave priority to something else.
For example, female cancer patients tended to have their priorities oriented around other people’s needs, like husband and children. Many of them experienced a great deal of pressure from their families to get back into the house and take care of everyone as soon as possible. That this pressure was usually indirect or underground made it even harder for the client to see and deal with it directly. Family members would say, “We just want our life to get back to normal.”
People with heart problems and burnout had oriented their priorities around work. Some of these people had to learn to trust others and delegate authority. Their healing process included asking themselves why they needed the control so much. Usually they found they didn’t feel safe without the control. They lived by their will rather than by their heart.
To maintain your health properly, you must take care of yourself holographically—that is, in all areas and all levels of your life. The healing process requires great change. It does not work to go to a healer to get something fixed so that your life can “get back to normal.” Rather, expect to move into new territory, new ways of caring for yourself, new life priorities, new ways to relate to your intimate partners, children, and friends. They will not all take it so easily as you would like; there will likely be some rough spots to get over, some differences of opinion. But in the long run, it will all work out for the betterment of everyone. Your job is to keep sticking to your truth.
You may say, ‘This sounds ridiculous. How can I do this when I am sick? Now I am supposed to rest.”
My answer is that this is the time you have given yourself to do it. In fact, you have everything that you need to do it. As we go through the list of levels of self-care and the things that need to be attended to, you will be able either to do them for yourself or to get someone to help you with them. Your exact care plans, of course, depend on how incapacitating your illness is in any phase of it. Just remember, this is your opportunity for great change. It is a time of reorientation, of overviewing your life and its deeper meaning. You now have the personal time to do it.
How you do use this time is completely personal. You may just need to sleep for weeks to facilitate a deep connection to yourself. Sleeping gives you time to yourself that perhaps you could not manage any other way. You may spend the time asking for help. Perhaps you never gave yourself the opportunity before. You will definitely spend some of the time revamping your value system. The changes in your value system will thread holographically through your life and continue to create changes for years to come.
As you begin your changes, it is handy to have a road map of what to expect in your personal experiences. To help you recognize your path, I will discuss the path of the healing process from the viewpoint of two different frameworks. The first is the framework of the seven stages that you go through in your healing process. The second looks at the healing process in terms of the seven levels of healing. Each level relates to a level of the auric field of human experience.