How To Keep Hope Alive On Your Healing Journey

This can be a tough one, I know. There have been many times throughout my healing journey when I’ve felt like I’m never going to get better and I’m just going to have to live with my symptoms for the rest of my life.

But, there have also been times on my journey when I’ve felt alive, and powerful and like I’m truly healing my body. It’s a mixed bag for sure, but it’s important to keep hope alive when you’re on this path. Not only will it make you feel better, I believe it will truly help you heal faster.

9 Tips To Keep Hope Alive

1. Use Positive Affirmations – Tell yourself that you are healing your body. That you are strong and have the power within yourself to heal your body. You have the ability to make the choices that will heal your body. The power is in your hands.
2. Use Feng Shui – The center of your home or the center of a specific room equates to the health and well-being center
   of the bagua. I don’t want to get too technical with it, but I’ll give you some simple tips to increase good energy for your health and well-being center. First, make sure there is no clutter or dirt, honor the center. Enhance the space with healthy plants; fresh flowers; earth symbols such as stones, shells and ceramics; yellow and green items; paintings of fields of yellow flowers or real or fake fruit in a colorful bowl. Your home should have a clean, vibrant and strong center for your health to thrive.
3. Use Visualizations – I love to do this when I’m getting acupuncture, a massage or a reiki facial. I imagine a shining blue light moving throughout my entire body. As it moves along it heals things. It would repair the holes in my leaky gut, kill the SIBO in my small intestine, heal my acne-ridden skin or detoxify my liver. Whatever your health issue, imagine it moving along and healing everything it touches.
4. Be Gentle with Yourself – When you are healing your body, it can take a lot of energy out of you. You might start to feel tired, down and like you just want to hang around the house. Honor what your body is feeling. If you need to relax at home, take a bath or read a good book, do that. Don’t feel pressured to push yourself when you need to relax.
5. Set Intentions – Much like positive affirmations, intentions can help you visualize your path to health. Write your intentions down and place them in a treasured spot in your home. I have a small box that I put mine in. Intentions can sound something like, “I am strengthening and nourishing my body each day.” or “I am very happy that my health is thriving.” Think of what you would like to manifest and write it down. You can make them even more specific to your health journey as well.
6. Work with a Functional Medicine Practitioner – I know, I sound like a broken record! But when I started working with my practitioner, I really started to make some headway with my health. Before I was just guessing what was wrong and what I needed. Which can be frustrating and expensive! For example, I was buying tons of supplements because I thought, “Oh, I have that symptom! I need that!” But a practitioner will take tests and truly find out what’s going on. They will give you a plan and have regular check-ups with you. This helps keep you accountable and on track, even when you start to feel hopeless!
7. Remember that Healing Takes Time – I’ve been working with my functional medicine practitioner for a little over a year now, and my health is still a work in progress. I have to remember that it takes time, and everything I am doing is adding a little more support to help my body heal.
8. Do Your Best to Follow Your Health Plan – Remind yourself that if you falter from your health plan or diet you will only feel worse. Your symptoms will flair up and a few minutes of enjoyment, will be shortly followed by sometimes hours of bad symptoms. And when you fall off of your diet or health plan, it makes it so much harder to get back on. It’s become easier for me to just stay with the path.
9. Remember All that You Have Accomplished – Look back. What symptoms or health problems did you used to have that are now gone? Remind yourself that you’ve already come a long way and you have the strength to keep going. If you healed yourself once before, you can do it again. Believe in the strength that you have inside of you. 

Trust me, when I randomly started breaking out in hives five nights in a row and had no idea what was going on, I felt hopeless. But when my practitioner discovered that they, and my other symptoms, were related to an underperforming liver and started me on liver supplements, my symptoms almost completely disappeared. I honestly never knew you could feel so good after eating!  The journey can be long and arduous, but the day that we find a solution to our health problems and start to feel better, is the day that it was all worth it.

You can heal your body. You can get stronger. You can thrive.

How do you keep the hope when you’re feeling hopeless? What makes you feel hopeful?