For many years, I suffered from debilitating neck pain. When I was in my early twenties, whenever I’d go home to see my parents, my neck would basically seize up so that I couldn’t turn my head. (Remember that not-so-good relationship I had with my mom? Yeah, I was pretty sure that was the culprit.) This happened often enough that I gave it a name: stress neck.
Stress neck came back with a vengeance (and way more frequently) after having a baby and enduring the stress of a not-working-at-all marriage. And then again after a divorce and juggling all the balls of a demanding little person, a job, and trying to make it all work.
It was something I came to accept as my body’s reaction to stress. But I hated it. I would lose days being miserable and hopped up on hippie pain killers. I’d sometimes see the chiropractor four days a week. It was a costly condition on more than one level.
But about a year ago, I heard something that made perfect sense to me for some reason: you not feeling good (physically or emotionally) is a sign that you are not keeping up with your own internal desire for expansion.
Translation: there’s something deeper you want for yourself, but you’re not letting yourself move toward it, so there’s internal friction. (And, depending on how much you want the thing, sometimes A LOT of internal friction.)
I knew this was the source of my neck pain.
When I heard that, I was like, “Oh! That’s why my neck hurts all the time.” It made perfect sense to me, though I couldn’t have explained why.
I was willing to entertain the remedy, especially if it meant my neck wouldn’t hurt anymore. The brief explanation of the remedy is this: connect with the most expanded (biggest dreaming) version of yourself as often as you can, and live from that place.
Why is it so hard to tap into that person regularly?
I just finished reading Becoming Supernatural (Dr. Joe Dispenza), where he shares the science of why so many people remain stuck in the lives they don’t really want. One of the core ideas was that our brains are incredible at playing out what comes next based on a body of evidence of what we’ve known in the past.
So, our desire to know the outcome has us essentially dragging the past forward into our future. We can’t change reality if we keep creating the same one, over and over. If you wake up every day and go through the same motions, you’re not allowing any space for a different idea or a different action – so five years later, of course you’re living the same life. This can be so frustrating.
Join who you are now with who you want to be.
In order to get to where you’re headed, you probably need new ideas and new experiences to build that bridge. Here are a few ways to do that.
Meditation. We can tap into our most expanded version of ourselves best in our sub-conscious. Why? Because there aren’t any distractions of the real world, jobs, kids, traffic, you name it. If you can touch the most expanded part of yourself in meditation, you can bring it that part of yourself into the world and make choices, have ideas, and solve problems through that lens.
Be present. If you are going through the motions and predicting the future before the future has happened, nothing can be different. But, bringing your attention to right now, and what is in front of you right now will allow for different questions and different answers to emerge. (This is a significant part of why I talk about feelings so much around here; noticing feelings and the sensations in your body are one way to practice being more present.)
Give up the need to know. It’s not enough to just be present; you have to stop pulling for the outcome in the way you think it should happen. I know this is really scary sometimes. This is where knowing and trusting yourself is essential – when you can do this, you can really let go.
And, like I mentioned last week, act as if you are already that higher version of yourself.
You are not static, you just have to build new experiences of yourself.
I don’t want to go touting miracle cures for odd health symptoms, but since I’ve started a daily meditation practice, I no longer have regular neck pain, and it never gets to the level it used to. And if pain crops up, I know that something I’m doing is out of alignment with the higher version of myself.
To have something be different, you have to do something different. Tell me, what are you ready to do differently?Y