by Dr. Cailin O'Hara, DACM, LAc, Dipl OM

Think about someone you love.
Do you think they deserve perfect health? Happiness? Everything their heart desires? I’m sure you do. I bet you want to see the people you love most absolutely thrive. I bet you can imagine them at their very best, totally joyful and living an incredible life. Close your eyes, and take a minute or two to imagine that.

What about you? Can you see that for yourself?
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When it comes to ourselves, we can make a lot of excuses and a lot of exceptions at the expense of our health and happiness.
​I’ll explain some of those ways in a moment. 

​First, I’ll ask you…
What if we prioritized our own wellness like we do the health of our children?
​What if we prioritized our own wellness like we do the security of our finances or the caliber of the work we do? 
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These are some of the thousands of ways that, on a daily basis, you block your innate vibrancy and wellness.

I know this because I’ve done it, I see you do it, and I’ve learned what happens when we stop doing it:
We heal.
 
One moment at a time, we can stop all of the self-sacrifice, self-sabotage, self-hate, self-neglect, impatience, negativity, anger and fear. We can create new mental, emotional and physical paradigms for ourselves- ones that actually support us unconditionally.
 
Think about it like this...
Even in the worst of conditions, we survive. We are a wildly resilient and adaptive species. But as amazing as that is, it doesn’t have to be so hard.
It doesn’t have to be about survival.
 
You deserve perfect health. What that looks like may be different for all of us. But one thing is true for everyone- you can either create the space to heal or create barriers to it. What are you choosing?

by Cailin O'Hara, MAcOM, LAc, Dipl OM

INTENTION
 It was the most empowering concept I had come across on my healing journey. In 2011, I was reading Deepak Chopra’s “The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire” at the time. I then dove into every book and resource I could find about how we create our own reality. 
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I spent years trying to understand it- the cause and effect of how our thoughts and feelings create our personal reality. As I worked with it, my health began improving. Everything did, actually. It may seem esoteric, but it’s actually quite simple....

1) The thoughts you think directly influence your health.
Think of something scary, and you’ll feel how your body responds. Think about something peaceful, and you’ll feel your body relax. This is SUCH a complex relationship of so many physiological processes occurring, but all you need to do is feel it happen. You influence how you feel, emotionally and physically, (aka your HEALTH) by what you think (and intend).
 
The more I focused my intention on how I wanted to feel, how I wanted my health to improve, the more it started to actually happen.
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2) The way you feel directs your decisions and, ultimately, your actions.
We use logic and emotion to make our decisions, which are generally informed by past experience and what we believe to be true. So, if a) we believe something to be true, b) we feel it to be true and c) our past tells us it’s true, then to us, it’s true. (This is where subconscious beliefs can wreak havoc.) What this means is that we can change the direction of our lives (and health) by tapping into feelings and beliefs that better serve our intentions.
 
When I began changing the way I thought about things toward a more positive note, guided by my intention to really heal, then my feelings about things shifted, too. I began making different decisions for myself and my healing. I began having different, and better, outcomes. I was gradually led down a very different and far more healing path… right to Chinese medicine and acupuncture, actually, which had the exact medicine I needed to heal for REAL.
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3) The decisions you make and the actions you take, which are informed by how you think and feel, create your entire life. 
Years ago, this was hard for me to wrap my mind around. It felt like A LOT of pressure to do everything just right so I could heal and have the life I wanted. But it’s not that complicated, actually. What is your intention, right now? What do you want for yourself?

As I got really clear about what I wanted for myself and intended for those things to become true for me, they did. I was able to take my health into my own hands, so to speak, and feel my way toward what I needed. I learned self-trust. I learned body-trust. I learned how profoundly connected the mind is with the body and how they are continuously influencing one another every second of every day.
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