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Empower Your Self to Heal Beyond Chronic Illness, Part 1: Just Who is the "self"in Self Healing?When struggling with the daily experiences of chronic illness, we rarely engage amost powerful (and empowering) healing force at our disposal. Many of us withchronic illness are so busy coping with symptoms each day, we may never even beaware this healing force exists. Instead, it remains buried beneath the everydaybusyness of what I think, feel, need, and desire--distracting attention away from,and depleting the raw energy necessary, for self healing chronic illness.This potent healing power is rooted in how it is you attend to, and relate with,who-it-is-I-am-at-core (i.e., your self at depth). This deep experience of self isrooted beyond the superficial sense of "myself" often associated withcharacterizations such as "tall", "short", "thin". This powerful core-self is alsoburied beneath the roles we play (e.g., child, parent, friend, lover). In fact,roles merely serve to further conceal self at core! Yet, when you do focus onyour genuine relation-with-self-within, compelling and quite familiar feelingssuddenly arise, as described in the three exercises below.1. The "Mirroring Authentic Self" exercise.Take time to look at yourself in the mirror. Initially, you may identify featuresof your face you judge as "acceptable". . . or not. For this exercise, however,imagine your face as the newborn infant you were in your very first minutes:Reflect on this fresh and lovely you! Know your newborn face could then (as now)bring smiles to complete strangers. It was you long before the weight (ofcomparisons and competition) was thrust onto your emerging identity.So look beyond your facial features--eye color, nose, lips. Indeed, arrive atyour true-face with which you were born by looking BEHIND your face, as if it is amask; permitting your true-face to emerge without descriptors, without judgments.As you do begin to recognize your birth-face (regardless of your age now), you at-once sense an ever-present "sameness" about who "I" am. As self-awarenessreawakens, you sense the aging face reflecting back is somehow "not me"--at leastnot me-at-core!This incongruity occurs in response to the labels and roles we each take on as ourown throughout life--costumes to act out our living play. As we do, we lose ourwholeness. We become fragmented into polarities and judgments defining both who-I-am and (too often ) who-I-am-not, whether I-am-acceptable. . . or that I-am-not.Now, however, you can realize the superficial roles and labels do NOT reflect who-I-am-at-core. You recognize deep within, the core-self-of-me-now feels the same,and indeed IS the same, as "I" have been since birth--long before my firstawareness of self-I-am. Indeed, this authentic-core-self-within never ages!2. "Would I still exist" exercise.To more fully access and amplify mirroring-your-authentic-self, you may alsoengage a truly powerful, transforming technique best described by Arjuna Ardagh in"The Translucent Revolution" (2005); and appropriately called "Would you stillexist?" (pp. 70-71)Ardagh suggests making an exhaustive list of all the qualities with which youidentify (e.g., teacher, Italian, a patient, sick). Then, one-by-one move throughyour list asking yourself the question, "If I no longer identified myself as. .." (a quality you listed), "would I still exist?" Qualities fall away as you
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