By Misa Hopkins

I was at a party recently where I was telling someone about my book. Not everyone is enamored with the concept of self-healing and taking full responsibility for your healing journey.

In this case, the woman I was speaking with said out loud what I believe a lot of us really want but don’t admit. She candidly admitted, “I don’t really want to figure it for myself. I want someone to tell me what is wrong and how to fix it.”

She was making it pretty clear that she isn’t looking for someone else to fix her without needing to assume any self-responsibility. She realizes she needs to play a role in her healing process. However, she is still looking for someone to make the diagnosis and prescription without her involvement.

Now, sometimes you are fortunate enough to find a doctor or healer that really is able to nail it the first time. They know exactly what is wrong and exactly what treatment solves the problem. You do what they say and you heal. This can happen often enough, that you could easily believe this is the best way to approach healing all of the time.

However sometimes, as many of us know who have experienced chronic illnesses, diagnosis is more challenging than it might appear, and you end up going to one doctor after another and one healer after another, perhaps getting some relief, but never quite getting complete healing.

In these cases, “I just want someone to tell me what is wrong and how to fix it,” doesn’t work. Symptoms of one illness can look just like the symptoms of another illness. Test results can sometimes be unclear or inconclusive. Treatment options can have a range of results and can even create more symptoms.

Even though it would be easier to receive an accurate diagnosis immediately along with the perfect treatment, it doesn’t always happen. In those cases, what most of us have learned to do is treatment shop. We try one doctor and then another, one treatment and then another—often with little to no results.

Finally, when we are about to give up, in a moment of awakening we realize we had better get a little more personally involved. We decide that perhaps we need to get a better understanding about what is going on with our bodies and how to get ourselves into a state of health. And just maybe we need to get some insights from a higher dimension.

That’s when we finally surrender the search for someone to fix us, and when we stop shopping and get involved, the healing journey actually begins. Healers call it a journey for a reason. We’ve had enough experience to know that illness is most often a confluence of emotional wounds from past abuse, subconscious needs being met, out-dated beliefs that have become part of our mind-set, patterns of behavior needing to be addressed honestly, physical predispositions and weak functioning, as well as physical stressors and exposure to toxins.

Sometimes the cure to chronic illness isn’t happening because the “fix it” solution isn’t broad enough to address all of the component parts. When you finally stop shopping for a moment and get still enough to notice what is really happening from the wisdom of your body and soul, you get new perspectives. Here are some ways you can acquire personal perspective about your journey:

Meditating
Quiet contemplation in nature
Dream work
Journey work
Intuitive writing and journaling
Artistic expression
Self-exploration

For some lovely insights and reflections received by spending time in nature, read Susan Amari Gold’s thoughts at a A Spiritual Walk in the Woods: http://newdreamfoundation.com/forums/index.php/board,61.0.html

Meditative, spiritual and artistic exploration of your inner awareness provide avenues of deeper insight into the real you and the part of you that is crying out for your greater awakening through physical pain. You aren’t going to get intuitive healing wisdom through a “fix it” answer. You get those perspectives through quiet reflection on your body, feelings, and thoughts.

You can actually take your new perspectives and form a more comprehensive approach to healing. You can even offer your insights to doctors and healers willing to consider your inner wisdom in recommending treatment options. Now you are in the journey. You are discovering you and what it takes to become your most whole self.

Rather than expecting someone else to figure it out and provide you with an answer to your chronic illness, you become the orchestrator of your healing at every level, addressing all the aspects that are at the root of your illness. Your intuitive wisdom opens up and you find yourself naturally drawn to the healers and treatments that will take you to your ultimate healing.