The Tests and Trials Before the Dream

I have come to think of myself as a healing journey guide.

I am a doctor, yes. But I don’t really do any “doctor-y” things anymore. 

I don’t prescribe medications or supplements, I don’t run labs, I don’t diagnose disease…

As I have moved through my career, I have shed most of the things I once thought were foundational to practicing medicine.

If going to school was like packing a suitcase, filling it with knowledge and modalities and tools, being out in the field and actually working with people has caused me to reconsider what I was carrying and led me to unpack it, slowly but surely, until only very basic, foundational things remained.

Really, only one thing has remained: The necessity of getting to know the person themselves. Understanding their story, what has shaped them, what has informed their views and beliefs, what has impacted them and, yes, what has traumatized them… what their childhood was like and what the condition of their heart is now.

From there, it is really pretty easy to understand how and why someone is sick.

I first got into medicine because of my own illness, Crohn’s disease.

After navigating my own healing journey and after working with thousands of clients at this point in my career, I recently looked back to see what similarities existed, if any, among our collective journeys.

What I found was that, while all of our journeys are very different in many ways, they are also incredibly similar in some very important ways.

As I mapped out what those similarities are, I learned that they are no different from the Hero’s Journey that Joseph Campbell mapped out many years ago.

Essentially, the Hero’s Journey is the adventure that all hero’s of epic tales embark upon. Think of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, or Simba in the Lion King, or Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: while all of these stories are incredibly different, you can see an arc, a common thread, that runs through all of them: the need to overcome difficulties before they transform. And this transformation allows them to embody and become someone much more aligned, authentic, beautiful, and free than their pre-adventure self.

The journey begins with the Call to Adventure. In both epic tales and in the healing journey, the “adventure” is not always one that is exciting or desirable; take Luke Skywalker for example, who’s adventure began when he found his family dead and home burned down.

My own healing journey began when I got sick. It was not a path I asked to walk, but was more or less forced to, since that is what illness does: it forces us onto a new path in life that we never thought we’d end up on.

Once on the path, the next step to a deep, transformative healing journey is Crossing the Threshold.

This can occur immediately, or months or even years after the diagnosis. It is when we become disillusioned with the conventional medical paradigm, the dead ends, the “it’s all in your heads”, the “totally normal” test results, the medications with too many side effects, and the pervasive and consistent feeling that we are missing something.

Finally, we get to a place where we decide there has to be more to this illness than this.

And so we go into pursuit of what this thing could be, not knowing that we have, at that moment, crossed a threshold:

We are leaving behind all that is familiar (the Western medical paradigm) and moving into unknown territory. And this is where the fun really begins.

Our nervous system is wired for survival. Everything our nervous system commands of the body is forever in line with what it believes to be best for our survival at any given moment.

And 99.9% of the time, what the nervous system is going to align with or move toward is familiarity.

When the nervous system is familiar with something, this is safe. Familiarity is predictable—there are no surprises, which means no threat of harm or worse, death, could result.

This is all well and good, except that sometimes the medicine lies in that which is not known. Said another way, sometimes it is the known and predictable things that are making us sick, and therefore we must go into unknown territory in order to heal. Said another way still, in order to heal, we have to break the habit of being ourselves (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Joe Dispenza).

We have to examine who we’ve become and why, and understand how those habitual thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs are creating the conditions in our body in which illness actually thrives.

So Crossing the Threshold into the unknown territory of “alternative” healing methods is a good thing and is indeed what is necessary in order to find the deeper healing we seek… but the nervous system begs to differ.

And this is where everything can start to go south.

The next stage in this healing journey is Meeting the Shadows. This is when we begin to confront all of the above mentioned faulty thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs; we begin to understand where they came from and why, and begin to understand what is more alignment with our authentic needs, desires, and wants.

This tends to feel great at first. We see all the ways we are stuck in survival patterns, how trauma has shifted our sense of identity and safety in the world, and how and why we are off track and therefore how and why our body is manifesting illness as a response.

We’ve found the answer to why we are sick! Hallelujah! Right?

Well, yes, absolutely! This is an incredible discovery and is so exciting and validating that there was in fact so much more to your illness than originally met the eye.

However…

As you confront these shadow aspects of yourself, the inevitable next step is to release and rewrite these faulty patterns. And this is when the nervous system decides enough is enough.

Enter the next stage of the healing journey: Challenges and Temptations.

Fear is a hell of a drug. And fear is the nervous system’s number one way of getting us to cease and desist, immediately.

No one likes to feel afraid. And when that fear is a deep, primal sense of threat, it is really counterintuitive—or more accurately, it is counter-evolutionary—to go against it. This fear is a challenge we must face in order to continue forward in our journey.

But then come the temptations… the old coping strategies, the numbing, the tuning out, the returning to toxic relationships, the re-engagement with harmful habits…

Remember, the nervous system loves what is familiar. It does not have the capacity to rationalize that something is technically not good for you in the long run. When the nervous system feels that your safety is threatened because you are moving into unfamiliar territory, all it can focus on is—what is the low-hanging fruit?

What is the quickest and easiest path back to some semblance of safety?

What is the quickest and easiest path back to familiarity?

The heartbreak of this is that the intensity of the fear tends to be commensurate to how close we are to breaking through to the other side—to transforming, to embodying that more true, more aligned Self, and in the case of the healing journey, to seeing a shift in our symptoms.

Paulo Coelho writes:

“Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.”

The Hero’s Journey is one that we will walk thousands of times throughout our lives.

It is not a one and done adventure, but rather a continuous spiral, around and around, each time bringing us more and more deeply into contact with the essence of what it means to be alive, to be human, to be ourselves.

What I have experienced in my own trips around and around, into and out of the unknown, deeper into contact with myself and more aligned with the essence of who I truly am…

Is that what Coelho writes is the truth.

Every time I embark on a healing journey, as I get closer and closer to “the prize”, so to speak, I face all the challenges, all the limiting beliefs, all the temptations to return to unhealthy behaviors. They all rise up to meet me, some rising up that have long been dormant.

And I have seen the same with my patients and clients and loved ones and acquaintances as well.

This is the roadmap of the healing journey. And when we have this roadmap in hand, we can see with objective eyes, this is normal and expected. It is normal and expected for us to be challenged with all of this shit so that we can learn how to face it courageously, fiercely, confidently.

We can face it because we know that what lies on the other side of that challenge is worth it.

We can face it because we know that the challenge is nothing more than that: a test that must be passed so that we can level up into a new way of being where that challenge no longer tethers us to misaligned ways of being in the world.

When we commit to a healing journey, we must be very clear with what we are doing: we are asking to be changed. We are asking to be transformed. We are saying, whether consciously or not: This illness is not me. There is something deeper here. And I am committed to finding it. And as a result, we must be willing to face and overcome the challenges that arise, as these are representative of what must be left behind in order to accomplish what it is we desire most—

To heal.

So like I said, nowadays I’ve come to think of myself more as a healing journey guide.

I get to know my clients, who they are and what they are and why they are.

And from there, I guide them across the threshold, into the belly of their challenges, and through to the other side.

And I’ll tell you, it’s more satisfying than any positive lab result or diagnosis I’ve ever handed to a patient.