The Body Doesn't Lie (30 page)

• The pleasant life, in which we sink deeply into, amplify, and intensify our pleasures—the path chosen by, say, a “foodie”
  
• The engaged life, in which we sink deeply into “flow” experiences—the path of a musician, an artist, or a gardener
  
• The meaningful life, in which we sink deeply into our service to others, seeking to dedicate ourselves to a larger cause—the path of a community organizer, a philanthropist, or even a hands-on mom or dad
  

When we focus our lives around a
combination
of these three factors, we tend to experience greater, more long-lasting satisfaction. This research can really help you zero in on what makes you come alive. What’s your purpose? Why are you here? What gives you pleasure? What allows you to lose yourself in the moment? What makes you shine?

If you need still more prompts, ask yourself: What do I love about myself? To get at the heart of this, try writing a letter to your future self: What do you want your children or grandchildren to be able to say about you?

Ask yourself, What is it that I can do all day long and time seems to stand still? Is it art, music, writing, dance, drama, gardening, cooking, sports? Do I love to be with children or elderly people? Do I love collaborating on big projects? Do I like spending time alone, working on a puzzle that I alone can solve?

Once you pin down that passion, ask yourself, How can I do more of that? How can I share the gift of that passion with the world?

If you find it difficult to see the path from where you are now to where you want to be, do what teachers do with their kids: Break it down into baby steps.

Stating a goal is the first step toward making something happen.

In your notebook, start with the biggest possible articulation of the goal.

• I want to become an astronaut.
  

Then keep breaking it down into smaller goals:

• I want to become an astrophysicist.
  
• I want to get a graduate degree.
  
• I want to get accepted to graduate school.
  
• I want to finish college.
  

Once you’ve walked the goal all the way back to where you are now (let’s say, studying for finals on your last college course), make a list of the five smallest things you can do to make that next goal happen. (Sharpen pencils for test; finish studying for test; take test; hand in test; order graduation gown.)

Once you’ve enjoyed your graduation party, cross finishing college off the list and move up one level. Break down that
next
goal into smaller steps. Then, systematically, keep taking those small steps, goal by goal, rewriting your lists in your notebook often so that you can rechart your course as necessary.

Do those baby steps sound too small? The researchers at Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab have been studying behavior change, and they’ve found that the way to make positive, lasting changes is to break those changes into microscopic units and then repeat those mini-steps until they have a place in your daily life.
⁷
For example, if you want to commit to flossing your teeth, floss one tooth—just one. Then, tomorrow, floss that one tooth again. And again. Every time you complete the tiny task, you get a little shot of dopamine in your brain (that hormone linked to pleasure, ambition, and addiction). Yep—you’re creating your own little addiction to success with every achieved tiny goal.

Eventually, you’ll have a habit, and you’ll be flossing up a storm. (And you’ll be on your way to the moon!)

Now that you’ve created the vision, and broken down the steps, there’s only one thing missing: for you to share it with someone you love.

My mom helped me develop a strong “contentment system,” the term I shared in chapter 1 that Paul Gilbert uses to describe a well-toned nervous system. When your contentment system is strong, it allows you to feel safe and soothed every day. Your orientation is on finding and maintaining strong, nurturing connections. Thanks to the work of my mom, my entire being was calibrated and preset to exist in Positive Feedback. Ever since I left home, I’ve spent my life trying to share this blessing with others.

In contrast, many of my patients were raised in households that favored the “drive system”—focused on achieving goals and increasing resources. This type of orientation can be exciting and motivating, but can wear you down if you press the accelerator for too long. Or, worse, they were raised in homes leaning toward the “threat system”—characterized by anxiety, anger, and disgust, focused primarily on threats. When your threat system predominates, you grow up feeling on edge, jumpy, and suspicious, focusing all your energy on finding safety—and you can be pre-programmed for Negative Feedback.

When I’m working with my patients, thirty years later, I rely upon the strength I got from my mom—from her genes, but also from her very contentment-system-focused parenting, all of the meditation and positive affirmations, all the nutritious, anti-inflammatory foods, and focus on exercise and relaxation. But while you may have grown up with parents who were either focused on the drive system or, sadly, the threat system, by now you hopefully recognize that everyone can go back and do it over again. You can all re-parent yourself and strengthen your contentment system with the Positive Feedback plan. I hope you’re basking in the glow of a strengthened contentment system right now, and you recognize how much sweeter, softer, and safe life can feel in Positive Feedback. Strengthening your personal connections with others will help you sustain those changes for a lifetime.

We spend so much time and energy being nice to other people at work that we sometimes forget to be nice to the people closest to us! My mom and my grandma are the two women who’ve inspired me most in my life; they found what they liked to do early on, and they found a way to share that passion with other people. They would always say,
“Give to people and love people”
(especially my mom—such a love bug!). I’ve seen my mom take great care of all our aging relatives—her aunts and her mother, other elders in our town. My granny did the same. Their compassion and dedication transferred over to me, and I can feel that same sense of dedication and purpose when I treat my own clients.

I love my job, and I credit my good situation to the fact that I visualized where I wanted to be and who I wanted to be working with. You might say that I brought these beautiful people into my life. I believe that positive energy attracts positive energy, and that God sends us the right people at the right time.

That is the core of radiant living: Your light shines out into the world as you go about your work and follow your dreams. Your passion and energy attract your soul mates, your best friends, your most compatible colleagues and collaborators. You surround yourself with strong and soulful people, and you all, together, support one another in your Positive Feedback way of life. That contentment system of amazing power continues to strengthen and push you ever higher toward your goals.

I hope that you’re feeling strong and ready to embrace the next phase of your life with passion and purpose. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is for me to see or hear about someone moving all the way through the Reflect * Release * Radiate process and coming out the other end with an entirely new life. To inspire you, let me leave you with a story of one of my most inspiring patients, a woman I’ll call Lisa. Lisa has moved all the way through the Positive Feedback sequence, and she’s currently building a radiant life with a new body and a new love. But not too long ago, she was in dire physical and emotional straits. She’d been living in Negative Feedback for most of her life.

When she first came to me, Lisa told me she felt very dizzy. She would be out and about and would lose her balance, and then she’d start to feel nauseated, occasionally even vomiting. She’d been seeing someone for her panic, but her condition didn’t seem to be improving at all. She had also been suffering with her neck pain and thyroid issues, and now she had fractured the big toe of her right foot, a trigger point for the liver. All her symptoms were classic signs of those irritability and aggressive tendencies that I call an “angry liver.”

Lisa had started drinking white wine rather routinely, perhaps (she thought) more than she should. She felt unable to make decisions. She was dating a man who wasn’t respecting her. She had hit a point where the pain in her body was screaming at her.

I sat her down with all the practitioners in our clinic and talked through her issues. We wanted to make sure we had the whole picture of Lisa’s life and why she was in pain. I drew a diagram of Lisa’s Body Timeline on a whiteboard. As we talked, it became clear that Lisa had never told her GP the most formative experience of her life: When Lisa was fourteen, she’d watched her best friend die in a car accident.

Her parents were away traveling at the time. Lisa was very upset, and asked her parents to come home and be with her. They didn’t, and she was devastated—and then she was furious. She decided to send herself to boarding school—whether to punish her family or herself, I’m not sure. Without missing a beat, she continued on to college, then graduate school. She became a titan of business, but she’d rarely had contact with her family since the accident. She had developed a tough shell around an incredibly fragile core.

After many years of workaholism and pushing herself to the brink, Lisa had finally gone to the doctor. Experiencing severe burnout, she had been so exhausted that she couldn’t get out of bed. Her GP referred her to an endocrinologist. After several months of treatment, that specialist had balanced Lisa’s hormones, but she was now on antidepressants. And
still
she couldn’t get out of bed.

Lisa was suffering. She was a managing director at her company at only thirty-four, with a whole division reporting to her. Her boyfriend was cold and removed, making her feel insecure and unloved. Her body was reacting to the rigorous demands she placed on it, which all started with her emotional issues. She needed to start loving herself and her parents more. She needed to release her draining relationship. She needed to face the trauma and anger of her past so that she could move on emotionally. As she was worked through her pain, I encouraged her to feel every bit of the anger—and boy, did she.

Once we made her Body Timeline, we had the information that we needed to talk about how Lisa could move forward. Using test results contributed by her GP, we realized that Lisa had thyroid issues, which an ultrasound confirmed.

Soon after our group consultation, Lisa set about serious Release work: She began processing the trauma of witnessing her friend’s death with a therapist trained in eye motion desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a modality introduced in chapter 5 that helps to release trapped memories. The fact that she’d witnessed that horrific accident was life-changing—as was the fact that she’d wanted her parents to come home and help her heal from that event and they refused. Both of those experiences were equally traumatic, and equally trapped within her body tissues. And now Lisa was finally, after twenty years, getting help with all of it.

Lisa did the Reflect work and discovered the lessons of her pain. She was able to release the pain and forgive her parents (and herself). She gave her unloving boyfriend the boot. And once we cleaned up her diet and all the medication she was on, we started to talk about how to move into the future:

Instead of taking medication, she started drinking smoothies and taking vitamin D and fish oil (carefully following her GP’s advice as she made the transition).

Instead of drinking Diet Coke, she relished nettle tea.

Instead of eating at her desk and working until seven or eight every night, she started making dinner plans with friends at delicious vegetarian restaurants, where nourishing foods were plentiful and white bread was rare, so she didn’t have to say no to her beloved baguettes.

Once she started taking these steps, radiance was right there to greet her. She did her Radiant Deep Dive and realized that what she wanted more than anything was a family. She created a meditation to help her visualize her new reality:

Open my way. Let love and happiness come my way. Let me marry, have children and a man to love and to adore me. When the time is right, when I am ready, please, send him to me. Thank you, God.

The universe provided (as it tends to when we’re receptive), and now—a year later—she and her high school sweetheart are married and planning to get pregnant. She’s preparing her body for a healthy pregnancy by following the Positive Feedback program. She knows that reducing inflammation, releasing toxins from her body and brain, and resetting her parasympathetic nervous system before she gets pregnant could make a big difference in her baby’s lifelong health.

Before she gets pregnant, as she prepares her body, Lisa is enjoying her radiance to the fullest. She’s training for a 5K—by running barefoot! And after hiding for years in drab clothes of black and navy, she hired a stylist to add color to her wardrobe. She feels safe with her new man, who exudes a love and respect for her that her previous boyfriend never did.

A year ago, Lisa was still struggling in the dark, but she says now it seems obvious: She had to be willing to really
feel
the pain, to hit rock bottom and release those old wounds, in order to find herself. And that’s exactly what she did. Lisa knows that as long as she follows her program, does her Morning Glory ritual, and sticks to her Radiate food lists, she’ll remain in Positive Feedback. And now, so will her baby—and thus begins a whole new generation of contented, connected radiant health.

So simple, and so powerful. So life-changing.

So what’s
your
story?

You’ve made it through a very challenging program, and a new world has opened up to you. The same structure of the Positive Feedback program that made it safe for you to wade through the truth of your pain will provide security to you as you boldly go forward and take risks in your new future.