The beliefs you have about yourself and the world, and the thoughts that you think, create the reality you live in. They quite literally shape the world you see around you, including the circumstances you find yourself in, the relationships you have with other people, your health, your success, and so much more. And by changing your mind and adopting a new set of beliefs and thoughts, you can completely transform all these circumstances and the world at large around you.

This has proven true time and time again throughout my life, and I believe it so deeply in my core. But I didn’t used to think this way. I was an incredibly shy and insecure kid. I was super scrawny and got made fun of for my body. This impacted me so much that I didn’t wear shorts for the better part of a decade and hid my underneath overly baggy clothing. I had crippling social anxiety, but I was also angry at the world. 

When I was twelve years old, I went through trauma that severely impacted my life for a great many years. After surviving four years of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member, that truth got out to my large extended family. I had a huge, tight-knit Italian family that did everything together, even sang any time we were around each other. Well when they found out what had happened, the family split down the middle. Family members whom I had previously been close with told me they no longer loved me and I wasn’t their family anymore. 

I was no longer permitted to see two of my cousins who had been my best friends. One day we were inseparable, and the next day they were like ghosts. I have no idea what they were told about what happened. 

I was left with PTSD, a horrible self-image, lots of negative emotions like guilt and anger that I didn’t know how to cope with, and self-harming behaviors. I turned to drugs. I turned to cutting. I turned to anything to numb the pain.

For those of us who have gone through a spiritual awakening, we often describe it as a defining moment in our life. It’s like a line drawn vertically across our time line, clearly delineating two separate sides: who we were before the awakening and who we became after. 

For me that moment happened in 2002 when I was handed a book that completely changed how I thought about the world. It changed my way of thinking, my way of being, my way of understanding and moving through life. As I turned the pages, it hit me so hard that what was written inside it felt like the truth, and like a sleeper agent, something inside of me woke up.

When I finished it, I started reaching for more. My intense hunger for even more knowledge became insatiable. I started devouring every metaphysical, spiritual, new age, and personal development book I could get my hands on. I watched documentaries. I attended seminars, workshops, and retreats. 

I dove in headfirst to all of the teachings I could find. I became obsessed with metaphysics, quantum physics, reincarnation, meditation, yoga, the Law of Attraction, the ancient astronaut theory, sacred geometry, biohacking, functional medicine, and different healing modalities. 

I couldn’t get enough. Every book was like a new door opening in an unending hallway. I wanted more. I needed more. I was hooked. 

My life became one big quest to learn, grow, heal, and expand every aspect of myself. It became my life’s mission, a purpose that drove me onward.

But…

As I began to change my mind and get better, my mother began to get worse. 

Her family had been ripped down the seams. She started to get physically sick, with both serious illnesses and with strange afflictions we had never even heard of before and doctors could barely explain. Doctors gave her pills to try to help her, and then gave her pills for the side effects of those pills. They threw everything at the wall, hoping something would stick.

She slept. A lot. At the height of it, she was on a Fentanyl patch, taking about eleven different pills every day, and sleeping for all but a few hours of daylight. She fell down all the time. She nodded off at the dinner table. She forgot conversations we’d had the day prior. 

This lasted over ten years while I lived with unbelievable guilt that I had destroyed my family and broken my mother.

In the end, it was my mother who inadvertently became my biggest teacher. For every step she took deeper into depression and illness, I climbed hand over hand in the other direction, out of the proverbial tunnel. 

I saw firsthand what happens to a human body and spirit when they go down that path. And then I saw what happened to my own body and spirit as I decided to change my mind about the nature of reality. I made a promise to myself that I would do everything I could to heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and that I would always prioritize my health.

To this day, in my free time you’ll find me still reading every book, trying every modality, and attending every workshop I possibly can. I believe that learning and growth should never be over. I love finding stuff that blows my mind wide open and sends my thoughts expanding into directions they never before knew existed. I love trying out new exercises, healing modalities, and programs to improve even further.

Personal growth and development is such an important aspect of life. If we’re not constantly growing and striving to learn new things then we become stagnant, bored, and we lose passion and purpose.

My mother’s story isn’t unique. So many people have accepted that illness is our natural state and wellness is difficult to achieve. They allow their thoughts and emotions to take wild control over their life. They don’t take the time to heal emotionally, to listen to their body, and to question why they’re sick in the first place.

Over the years I have learned that anytime I have an illness that the first thing I need to question is my emotional state. 

Up until 2017, I was working in the bustling tech industry in the Bay Area of California. I was climbing the ladder in the marketing world. I had been head of marketing at a small start-up for years and loved my job and my coworkers. When that company closed its doors because we lost funding, I was devastated, but then I found another job as head of digital marketing for a larger tech start-up that was well funded. The commute was closer to my house, along the water in the Jack London neighborhood of Oakland. I could see the iconic Oakland cranes in the distance that were George Lucas’s inspiration for the AT-AT Walkers in Star Wars. I was making a six-figure paycheck. On paper, everything looked perfect. Inside, I was reeling. I started having panic attacks every night but had no idea what they were from. Finally, other physical issues started popping up, and my good friend who is a functional medicine doctor tested me and found out I had Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease where your immune system attacks your thyroid gland.

During this time, I had also decided to take yoga teacher training. During the week, I would go to my job, then I spent Friday evening to Sunday evening at teacher training. From the moment I walked into TT that first night, I felt at home. Like I was right where I was supposed to be. I was surrounded by like-minded people, learning about pranayama and chakras and trying all types of yoga. Everyone was open and real and allowed themselves to be vulnerable and do the hard inner work. I could talk about all the things I loved talking about. It was beautiful. But then the dreamy weekend would end and I would be back at work and having panic attacks in the evenings again until the next weekend would roll around.

When the Hashimoto’s disease diagnosis came, it clicked. I knew it was a sign that I wasn’t where I was meant to be and wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. I felt like the universe had been poking at me with the panic attacks, trying to get my attention. Like, “Hey. Hey, you. Hey. Over here!” But I had just ignored it. So it took me by both shoulders and shook me hard to make sure I couldn’t ignore the message. Sometimes the universe wants you to move in order to discover the path you’re meant to go on, and if you’re not moving, it will make things so uncomfortable and painful on your current trajectory that you have no choice but to move.

Later on I went through one of the most traumatic things of my life when members of a community that I was a part of started spreading lies about me on social media. The people who posted about me created an invisible filter that distorted everything I had said and done and then flipped it to fit the narrative they were telling. Friends who knew what those people were saying was untrue did not stand up for me. Other people who had told me how much I had changed their life, and how grateful they were for me just months earlier, were now liking posts that were libeling me. Essentially, they were rewriting their experience. It was the strangest thing I had ever watched unfold, like witnessing a live psychology experiment.

The whole experience was traumatic. I felt publicly humiliated and attacked, yet silenced since comments were disabled so I couldn’t defend myself. People who had never met me before were helping spread lies about me. It was infuriating and frustrating. I felt unsafe. I feared for my safety and for my family’s safety. For a while, the whole experience robbed me of my joy, stripped me of my confidence, and destroyed my trust in people. I was angry, traumatized, and didn’t know whom to trust. I just wanted to get away from everyone. My adrenals were in fatigue from all of the stress, which sent me into a Hashimoto’s flare-up, and I started rapidly gaining weight. I was in a dark place.

Now if we know anything about chakras the throat chakra is associated with your ability to speak your truth. And of course the thyroid gland is in the front of your neck. I believe my thyroid was so affected because I had been silenced. The job that I had been working at during that time I felt silenced in so trouble with my thyroid was already brewing underneath the surface.

In addition to the weight gain being caused by a Hashimoto’s flare-up, I realized it was also an unconscious attempt to insulate myself from the attacks. Once I healed emotionally, the weight quickly melted off with no effort on my part.

Headaches

I used to get really bad tension headaches. They started while I was working at the tech industry start-up, and I thought it was because I sat at a computer all day. They were so debilitating. I would get them several times each month, and they would last for around five days at a time. Nothing would make them go away. I would get a chiropractic adjustment, acupuncture, and a type of physical therapy called Egoscue every week. I would take Advil, use ice, and use heat, and all of that combined would sort of dull the pain enough to get me to a place where I could kind of function. It was awful. The various practitioners told me it was likely caused by clenching my jaw, which I would often do throughout the day without even realizing it. This went on for about seven years. When I left the tech industry to become a yoga teacher, the headaches improved but didn’t completely go away. My theory of the computer turned into anytime I looked at my phone for too long. It must be an ergonomic thing, or I clench my jaw when I look at it for too long, I thought.

It wasn’t until I had a QHHT session and had the practitioner ask my Higher Self while I was under hypnosis what was causing my headaches that I got a real answer. The answer I received was that they were caused by getting too wrapped up in the emotions of this planet and the human experience. I was told I needed to stop letting people and things get to me and focus more instead on my mission on this planet.

“Hmm,” the practitioner replied. “I’m hearing that it’s almost like there’s so much emotion built up that there’s pressure inside your head.”

To me that translated to stress. I started thinking back to the time when the headaches first started. Within a month or two, Shane and I had gotten married, bought and moved into a new house, and started new jobs. They had all been positive things, but it had been a really stressful time. Then my next several jobs had all been high stress. I had started to believe that the headaches were triggered by sitting at a computer or staring at my phone for a long period of time, so whenever I did those things, a headache would pop up. It was such an ah-ha moment!

Since then, I’ve started paying attention to when headaches surface. They’re always seemingly out of the blue. Whenever I feel one coming on, I relax my shoulders and the muscles in my face and take a few deep breaths. I notice what emotions I’m feeling, what thoughts I’m thinking, and what’s going on in the rest of my body. Sometimes I just spent a lot of time staring at my phone and started thinking about how I’m going to give myself one. Other times I’m feeling stress, anger, frustration, or worry and it’s causing tension of some kind in my body. I can usually feel my leg, hip, and shoulder muscles tensed up like they’re forming a barrier and keeping the emotion locked in, which creates pressure in my head. So I focus on feeling the emotion and releasing it. And since that time, I’ve been able to successfully stave off a headache every time. It’s completely changed the quality of my life.

The only person who can really cure you is you. You create your circumstances. Since you chose them, you can change your mind and un-choose them too. Decide that healing is more appealing than illness. Rather than focus on your illness, focus on visualizing and feeling a life of health and vitality. Be that person who has a great attitude no matter what life throws their way.

What you believe will cure you is what will cure you, but you have to make up your mind that you want to heal. You have to have the intention of healing. If you believe Western medicine doctors will help you, then you’re much more likely to heal after that pill. If you believe a vegan diet can cure you, then it can. If you believe Chinese medicine will cure you, then it will. But the truth is that you don’t need anyone other than yourself. Your body knows how to heal itself. That’s why the placebo effect is so powerful. Your body is responding to your thoughts and your beliefs.