By Misa Hopkins

This week on Misa Live! Sacred Insights for Getting What You Want in Health and in Life, I talked about the basic needs within us that can cause and aggravate illnesses, if they are not met.

These basic needs include such qualities at being heard, seen and understood; feeling respected, honored, valued and worthy.

If you haven’t heard the broadcast, I go into much greater depth about how unmet needs manifest physically, and the two steps you can take to begin meeting your most profound need right now. You can listen here at: http://misamovies.s3.amazonaws.com/Sacred-Insights-Ep2.mp3

The very premise of my book, The Root of All Healing: 7 Steps to Healing Anything is based on the awareness that such unmet needs, left unmet, become festering emotional wounds that contribute to physical illnesses.

The seven steps in the book are designed to help each of us open up to and recognize these unmet needs, discovering ways to make sure they are met with love.

What many of us do, once we realize these fundamental needs exist, is demand that the world pay attention to us. Because the need feels so pressing when we finally awaken to it, our demands are usually so harsh, we push away the very people that might help us meet our fundamental need. Or we do the opposite, we request so softly that people around us don’t even realize we have a need and are trying to request their help in meeting it.

While we want the need met, there is also a part of us that is scared to death to be that vulnerable. And so we set up an energetic, push-me-pull-you field, where we are demanding what we want or discreetly implying we need something, but unable to actually ask for it and let it in.

I did this for years before I realized that I was actively pushing away the very healing I said I wanted.

My first and most pronounced unmet need was a desire to be heard.  This makes complete sense when you consider that I was sexually abused as a child and certainly, at least for one very profound moment, felt deeply unrecognized and unheard as the abuse was taking place.

What I didn’t realize was that in order to be heard, I needed to learn how to hear myself–quietly and deeply–with great compassion. No one else was going to be able to hear me until I truly heard myself.

That need had a lot less to do with day-to-day interactions than I thought it did. At its core, it came from a deep longing to be felt with compassion, and the person who could best feel me was me! I was the one that had walked in my shoes and it was my own compassion I needed to experience.

Once I could feel and hear the depths of my own heart, almost miraculously, so could others. The symptoms I had been living with for years, while my hormones were completely out of balance, were able to heal. I was able to attract the right doctor, receive the right therapy, and heal both the physical and emotional wounds.

I discovered that listening to others became significantly important. By listening in the way I wanted to be heard, I created a field of energy in which listening was valued. My world began to reflect that value, as people stepped into my life that honored me with their profound and heart-felt listening.

We didn’t always agree, but that wasn’t the point. I knew they heard me with their ears and their hearts, and that provided enough healing that we could agree to lovingly disagree.

In my experience, these fundamental needs must be met. They are not childish wishes. They reflect moments where our primary existence and right to be loved were denied. My surprise discovery was that as an adult they needed to be fulfilled from the inside out.