Have you ever wondered what your main barrier/s to sustainable health might be exactly?
Unnamed and not confronted, these barriers will stay put and accumulate, forming a seemingly solid blockage on our intended Life Path – and poor health. Identified, understood, and addressed with respect, even most formidable barriers will transform into great stepping stones on our spiritual journey and testament to our strength. With that will come a sustainable solution to our health problem – as a byproduct of the process.
Before we start on a new (amazing) diet/exercise/meditation (insert your external influence of choice here) which promises to change our life forever, let’s pause and look a little deeper into the roots of our health – and life’s -problems.
Here are some common barriers to sustainable health which might be at the roots of our current health problems. There are two types!
- There are bold and obvious barriers to health such as are eating wrong food or not exercising enough; working too much or sleeping too little or staying in a Soul destroying job or relationships. We recognise them as problems; we might do nothing about it but we know we should.
- And there are less obvious barriers which are probably more important because they form the real roots of our health problems. These obscure barriers relate to Four Forgotten Faces of Health – adaptability, self actualisation, mental wellbeing and social integration.
Ten less obvious barriers to sustainable health
- Identity problems such as Poor sense of Self outside of our social or family roles
- Relating problems such as imbalance in giving and receiving or boundaries problems
- Mismanagement of emotions such as emotional indulgence or denial or entanglement
- Life Experience problems such as unintegrated life experiences or ’Unfinished business’
- Lack of Resources such as unmet personal needs or lack of activities feeding your Soul
- Wholeness problems such as disconnection between your mind, your heart and your actions
- Aspiration problems such as unfulfilled or denied plans or dreams
- Contribution problems such as not developing your unique talents or not sharing them
- Lack of sustainable solution to our health problems – or disease, a pain, or discomfort
- Lack of Joy – this can range from depression or anxiety to resignation due to seemingly unresolvable life situation.
Each barrier to health may look:
- big: ‘it’s just too much for me’
- permanently present: ‘it’s always happening to me’
- immovable: there is nothing I can do – it’s just the way things are, always were, always will be’.
A combination of several barriers (which is typical as they are interconnected) may indeed look like a total obstruction of our life path. The Art of Life consists of respectfully de-assembling and transforming these barriers – with love – into stepping stones, big or small. At times acknowledging the limitations while making a full possible effort. Minus drama. Plus the lesson on open mindedness, creativity and empowerment.
My question to you:
- what do you think is One obvious barrier to your health?
- which One Barrier from the ‘less obvious‘ list do you feel is most in need of your attention?
Converting Barriers into Stepping Stones: where to start?
Therapies including Body work, Energy work; counselling; and even career opportunities advice look like obvious places to start when working on barriers to sustainable health. This is the approach where we treat each barrier as a ‘problem’ and we go about ‘fixing’ it, boldly and decisively, making reasonable plans and constructive decisions.
However, often behind each barrier there is a history of how exactly it came into being…and so a respectful exploration of it – not as a problem but rather as some ‘feature’ in our life can unearth many jewels of personal life experience. From this perspective another place to start will be from inside out, from most unconscious and untamed part of ourselves – which is our night dreams.
Weird, raw and often incomplete, our night dreams make a fertile ground for development of a wild, intuitive, powerful part of us. Dreams and Dreamwork are a perfect place to start getting insights – with depth and breadth that nothing else will – into a constructive conversion of our barriers to sustainable health to stepping stones. These insights have to come from a free and uncensored place first.
We experience an ever increasing pressure to focus on relying on our conscious mind and logic to resolve our problems. As a result we ignore our vague and poorly understood bodily ‘felt senses’ and oftentimes totally bizarre night dreams – as if these are not part of our reality.
Because of continuous practice we are generally good at ‘daylight’ conscious approach to resolving our problems; and because of lack of such a practice in tapping into our feeling and dreaming Self – it’s the trust into our deep internal processes we usually tend to fall short on.
Dreams and Dreamwork are perfect to help us start healing this divide between our thinking and feeling natures. Working with Dream Zones lets us spotlight a particular area of our Life and our Being.
‘Zone of True Potential’….’Zone of Fear’….’Letting Go Zone’...’Zone of Power’.…’Zone of Joy’….I can write an entire article about any of these Dream Zones and what they opened up for me. Each is invaluable and unique.
Dream Yourself Together
I hope you will take up an opportunity to join us for a FREE Dreamwork Challenge on the 11-15th of June. Till then….
- Start recollecting your recurring dreams and your recent dreams
- Join our Dream Yourself Together group
- Keep asking your Self questions…….one day, your Soul will speak to you.
Subscribe to our Cafe Self Newsletter to receive a worksheet ‘Five Faces of Health’. This simple and concise exercise will immediately highlight the area of your life which requires your attention and where every little effort will bring big results.
