It is not a quick fix! Please keep this in mind as you begin your own very personal healing process. I continue to heal each and every day. Remember, the most important thing is to BELIEVE you can heal. Your mindset is without a doubt THE MOST IMPORTANT key to the healing puzzle. Hang around people who are positive at all times ~ the “lemons” in your life will boost your spirit and keep it alive and focused no matter how bad it gets, or how deeply sick you are. It takes time… not days or weeks or months… but years to heal! Think about the amount of time you have been sick, a long long time for most of us!

~Your mindset is the most important key to the healing puzzle.~

Dr. Jay Davidson (my Lyme doctor/life coach) explained it to me like this… You were born with a certain size bucket. Not everyone is born into an ideal situation. Likewise, our “buckets” keep getting filled as we live our lives. We all are exposed to chemicals, toxins, stress, death of a loved one, pesticides, vaccines, amalgams (mercury fillings), pharmaceuticals, sickness and more. These things come into our lives at different stages and fill your bucket. The key to understanding this bucket theory is to know that symptoms and chronic inflammation kick in when the bucket is overflowing. Stress adds to the problem (adds to the bucket!) and it becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral once it starts. Symptoms lead to more stress and you become sick. Sickness can appear as Cancer for some, depression, or, in my case an autoimmune disease call CLD – Chronic Lyme Disease. Don’t expect a magic pill, supplement or immediate fix. Everyone’s healing plan will be different. Take your time, follow your instincts and pray to God for strength and guidance every single day.

My healing journey initially began with others words and my own beliefs. Write these quotes on sticky notes and place them in key places around your home. Read them to yourself every day, several times a day.

“I love myself completely and I accept myself just as I am today”

” You were given this life because you are strong enough to live it.”

Recite them and believe in this with your core being. Loving yourself unconditionally is necessary in healing! Find and stay close to people who love you and feed you with only strength and positivity. My husband and my Mom stood by me throughout my entire ordeal. They cried with me, held me tight, fed me with words I needed to hear, listened to me, answered correctly for me (especially when doctor after doctor after doctor prescribed me prescription drug after prescription drug) ~ the answer was always NO~, stayed up night after night with me, stepped up and took care of our kids when I didn’t have the strength or right mind, kept me focused, and helped me BELIEVE I could beat this monster that had taken over my life.

PRAY! Pray, meditate, and breathe and be still. Pray to God for strength and guidance every day. Find spirituality that works best for you. Find people who root for you and cheer you on. Surround yourself with a community of people who support each other and lift each other up to become better, more loving humans who feed off of one another and grow!

Finally, practice gratitude~ I have found the trick to practicing gratitude is to look at the most simple and mundane aspects of life. Even in the trials of everyday life I find really good things everywhere I look. Noting each and every blessing in the things I do helps me to heal. Sometimes a change of perspective is all it takes to allow gratitude to run free in any area of our lives. I figured out that once this happens everything begins looking like a great big THANK YOU. With gratitude comes an abundance of peace and healing. Write 5-10 things you are grateful for every single day in a notebook. They can be as simple as “I am grateful for the sun that shined today” or “I am grateful for my warm comfy bed”. Keep this gratitude journal going and you will be surprised what happens in your life. I have stacks of journals from 1997! I know my kids will enjoy looking back on these some day ~

~Stop apologizing. You don’t have to say sorry for how you laugh, how you dress, how you do your hair, how you speak. You don’t have to be sorry for being yourself. DO IT FEARLESSLY. It’s time to accept, this is you, and you gotta spend the rest of your life with you. So start loving your awkwardness, your sarcasm, your weirdness, your unique sense of humor, the way you look, your EVERYTHING! It will make your life so much easier to SIMPLY BE YOURSELF~ 

“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself”