When Life Isn’t Working According to Plan…
I am going to share something very raw and personal with you. It’s something I don’t often do in my blogs, but we are all one human community and in sharing this I hope it will connect with what is true in you and help you find your way to a deeper, more authentic way of being.
Telling the truth, even if it is not pretty, is transforming, healing and liberating, even if it is hard to admit to yourself or others. And so few of us share our truth in public for fear of what others may think. I want to share my truth.
As a doctor I have listened to more than 10,000 unedited, unvarnished stories of people’s real lives and their intimate truths. And this I have learned–that we are all part of the same human family with the same longings, dreams and struggles.
All of us dream, hope and yearn for happiness, love and success measured in our own way. What I have a seen is how we often stand in our own way by limiting ideas, beliefs and theories about life, the thoughts we get stuck on that keep us from the life and love we want.
What I want to acknowledge is that I have kept myself from a very big dream because I didn’t fully own it and instead held onto excuses, or was stuck in unconscious beliefs of why it was not possible.
I know the power of dreaming, of believing in and creating my dreams. In college, I knew I wanted to create healing in the world. I acutely felt the deep suffering of our human souls and the deep physical suffering of so many. I wanted to create more love, compassion and healing in the world. I didn’t know the exact way it would unfold.
But I went to medical school and found my way through my own illness to a new way of understanding the wonder of the human body. I learned from the inside out how we are connected to everything around us – the food we eat, our environment, how we grow and raise our food, the way we move, the rhythm and love in our lives.
In my struggle with chronic fatigue, I found a way out through the science of
Functional Medicine and have been blessed with the ability to share it and experience profound blessings as a result. I have been honored to be part of transforming many lives and writing seven New York Times bestsellers designed to create more healing and love in the world. I dreamed that change into being. I knew I had a mission, a calling to share this radical new medical paradigm and I believed it and saw it through fearlessly.
But there are other dreams that have not worked out so well for me. I have two beautiful children and the blessing of extraordinary friends and community. But in the area of love I had beliefs and behaviors that kept me from having the love that I wanted.
After two marriages and a recent relationship that didn’t work out, I recognized that maybe it was “me,” how I choose, how I was, my behavior, what I thought and believed about love, that kept me from having the love that I wanted. The truth was that I just didn’t believe in love- and that is why I never manifested it in my life. I realized that my experience as a kid set me up not to trust or believe that true love was possible. All I saw was broken or half-lived relationships.
My parents divorced when I was five and my mother remarried a man she didn’t really love and had a horrible 40-year marriage. And my sister, who died last year, was married and divorced three times. Something screwy set us up for picking the wrong people.
My last relationship was better, deeper, more honest, but still not quite a fit and what I learned was that I didn’t believe in true love and didn’t even dream that it was possible, that I was perfectly capable of settling for half love or worse.
I now deeply know that it was my own thinking, my own refusal to dream the love I wanted into being, to even ask for it, that has kept me from it. And now, shifting that thinking, redirecting my internal compass I know that I can create what I want, I know I can find and experience the love that I dream.
But I didn’t get to this understanding by myself. It took work! I got help from Lauren Zander, a master coach, who started the
Handel Group – one of the world’s leading coaching companies that forced me, however lovingly to see the truth about myself, who demanded that I own my dream and create it. I have been great at creating my dream in many, many areas, but not in this one.
In fact, there is a science to manifesting your dreams in every area of your life, a methodology that took me through a deep process of resetting, rewiring my thinking and emotions. It is called the
Handel Method.
We all have dreams – dreams for love, for career, for our bodies, for our finances, for our health, for “fill in the blank.” But often our beliefs, theories and thinking get in our way of having full on happiness and living into our dreams. Getting help from a coach has been one of the best things I have ever done for myself. Think of it as therapy with teeth! I encourage you to try it.
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Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD
