I just finished teaching a workshop at Kripalu about the 6 Steps To Healing Yourself from Mind Over Medicine, and one of the questions that came up over and over was “How do I learn to hear the voice of my intuition?” We all know there exists within us this part that I call your “Inner Pilot Light” and it holds the keys to not only optimal health, but healthy relationships, finding and fulfilling your calling, tapping into your connection with the Divine, and making aligned decisions. Yet many people don’t feel connected to this inner voice.

My dear friend Shiloh Sophia and I are teaching a virtual art workshop on Friday about how to strengthen your relationship with this part of you. (You can sign up here.) We will be delving deeper into this topic on Friday, but until then, I asked Shiloh to help us understand what it might mean to tune into this wisdom force and come into alignment with this guidance system. In this guest blog, she shares 5 keys to unlocking your Inner Healer.

Take it away, Shiloh!

“I’ve tried all the ‘heal yourself’ techniques that have cured others, so why am I still sick?”

“I feel like no matter what, I just can’t quite figure out this self healing stuff, and I am ashamed to tell others I have been unsuccessful.”

“I think I must just be too damaged from the wounds of the past to ever be truly whole, I am just broken.”

If you have found true healing to be illusive, perhaps you have found yourself saying things like this. These statements become beliefs that block healing.

Unlocking the potential of your Inner Healer begins with a choice to make a connection with your inner world. Here you can get access to the keys that open the hidden places within you where healing information lives. These keys belong to you and are used to define your own journey and experience of personal power on your own terms. You don’t need to be ‘all better’ or have your ‘stuff in a pile’ to have an experience of wholeness right where you are, right now. The Inner Healer is a powerful presence within you that is a consciously chosen relationship, one that can change everything about how you relate to your wounds and your worlds.

These ideas and inquiries are designed to provide you with immediately applicable practices, or keys, that serve to unlock access to the healing information that may be available to you. The “wound” you are grappling with might be a physical illness, or it may be an energy blockage or an emotional wound. The wound is whatever it is that ails you, and also, informs you. As Rumi says, “The wound is place where the light enters.”

5 Keys To Unlocking Your Inner Healer

1. Key of Surrender: There is freedom available when you are willing to let go of knowing, or needing there to be a reason.

Resist the idea of it being someone’s fault, especially yours. Hopelessness, frustration and confusion often result when you are trying your hardest to do everything you can, read every book on the subject, and see every healer and still, you aren’t able to cure what harms you or holds you back. Maybe you feel even worse after you have been trying a while, because not only are you not healed, now you feel ashamed because your visualizations and affirmations aren’t yielding the desired results. The effort you make in gaining control often feels fruitless – and can be exhausting. We keep searching for the ‘reason’ or the meaning and often this informs us, but it can also hold us back. There is a great mystery in our world and not all of it has clear reasons.

Perhaps you think getting wounded in the first place is your fault, or the fault of someone else. Even if that is ‘true’ on some direct or indirect level, the energy of blame is not conducive to creating healing pathways. Perhaps there isn’t a reason or an answer to be found. Blame is a hindrance to communicating with your Inner Healer. Forgiveness opens the channels, but only when you are ready to surrender needing to have all the reasons.

2. Key of Choice: Choose to establish a conscious connection with the life force known as the Inner Healer.

All of us have the capacity to heal, but not all of us will heal. Regardless of a full healing the experience we have of our lives is determined by our perspective and what we believe is possible. A relationship with the Inner Healer is a call and response. This connection enables Information to travel from the unconscious realm where the clues to healing often live into the conscious realm so that you can take informed action on behalf of your healing.

Everyone has an Inner Healer who is in the on-going process of awakening. Even if you don’t know what that means yet, you have the opportunity to be open to the possibility so that systems can begin to come into alignment and bring you information that wasn’t available when trying to think and act yourself well. Consider the realm of distance healing where we know that the human mind employs Quantum Physics to make an intent for healing be realized. We have heard many stories about it happening over long distances, over the phone, and through prayer, and most of us believe this evidence, and yet we have trouble believing that we can send a message the brief distance to our inner world and have it heard! When the messages begin to flow more freely, the connection will be strengthened and potential will be released.

3. Key of Authority: Choose to be the one to define your experience of both your wound and the way it is being transformed.

Choosing to work with your inner Healer is an invitation to overcome the shame of being sick. Do you shame yourself when you aren’t able to “succeed” with regard to your healing? Sometimes you might even begin to hide that you STILL don’t feel good. You might wonder: What is wrong with me? This can result in an even deeper inner healing crisis than whatever health issue you might be navigating! Hidden shame can remove us from our capacity to interface clearly with the healing that might still be in a potential state within us. Isolation from ourselves, our spirit and others often ensues. The next steps are revealed by the Inner healer when, and only when, we are ready to receive the transmission. Our job is to make ourselves available to that resonance. To watch, listen and beckon into the possibility.

The shame isn’t something that we make up on our own. It is often in association with what others will think, our story of why we are wounded in the first place, and the collective ‘story’ of judgment against those who are sick. There is a dangerous undercurrent of condemnation running through the self-healing movement that points the finger at the victim. Each of us must CHOOSE for ourselves how we are going to relate to our own wellness, instead of taking on the beliefs of those around us. All of us can learn from our wounds, and most of us do, but it is HOW we relate to it that we will find the freedom in the chaos.

4. Key of Self-Empowerment: Choose to make your healing into a journey – a quest, so that you are the one authoring your experience.

This is your journey and you choose the story that gets told. A healing journey is not a destination. Yet for many of us it is one that lasts a lifetime. Being so hard on yourself about where you are on your healing journey can be just as damaging as believing that you are incurable or always going to be broken. Whether it is an illness, a childhood trauma, or a failed marriage, how you relate to your wounds defines your actual experience of it and how that lives within you, for how long and in what way.

You do not need to live up to any story that is not authentic to you and your own experience. Your story is your story and it is unique to you and no one else. How you contextualize it will affect every decision you make including how your body feels and whether or not it can access the stored potential of healing. Sometimes that potential is available and moves towards full remission and healing, but sometimes it doesn’t. Notice the story you tell yourself when it doesn’t go the way you want it to go because it will define the next steps. You get to choose to move and have your being as victim or self empowered.

While others may be helping and guiding, true healing is guided by you. This doesn’t mean you will be able to be cured every time. Choosing to relate to your experience as a journey makes it much more possible for your Inner Healer to reveal what needs to happen next and how it can happen.

Your wound is like the specific object yielding to the force of your desired intention moving through the vehicle of your Inner Healer. The stored healing potential gets activated and begins to be transformed into the motion of healing. As Albert Einstein says, “When an object is being acted upon by a force like the electric or gravitation force, then it can be assigned an energy that depends only upon its location relative to the source of the force. This energy is called the potential energy – “potential” as it can easily be transformed into kinetic energy associated with the object’s motion: As the object yields to the pull or push of the force, its potential energy decreases while the energy associated with its motion increases.”

Transformation is available without an external healer or overall life shift, right inside of this moment and it isn’t based on what you deserve and it isn’t a reward for good positive thinking. It is your decision to become a conscious co-creator with your Inner Healer.

5. Key of Self Compassion: Your vulnerability is a message to your Inner Healer that you are ready to listen and to love.

Wounds are leading the way, when it could be wellness leading the way to the future. You, like most of us may be allowing yourself to be defined based on how you relate to your deepest wounds. Instead of relating to your choices from the perspective of your most well places, your decisions for your life are based in fear connected to the most damaged parts of who you are. Most of us don’t even know that we are doing this, since it is our brain’s natural pattern to choose the deepest wound as reference for future choices. For that to shift, you have to CHOOSE. To ask your brain to reference a potential instead of a past experience. This doesn’t take away from the impact or significance of the wound and how it shaped you, but instead asks for a new view. One that includes compassion towards yourself.

Often when we think of someone healing through a sickness we say, “They were being so strong.” What happens if you choose tenderness combined with strength? Many of us are just so busy being strong through our weaknesses but sometimes it is honest, self-compassion that will cause us to break through. Then, inside of that openness the voice of your Inner Healer can come through and show you what you weren’t able to see before. When we are being too tough on ourselves we create a barrier to our internal guidance system. In other words, our Inner Healer couldn’t get through to us because we were blocking it out of fear and our need to ‘keep it together.’

Working with your Inner Healer from a space and place of presence is about establishing a flow – a dynamic connection of giving and receiving. Often due to the challenges you have faced, preoccupation with wounds from the past, or fears for the future you can ‘block’ the wisdom your body, mind and heart want to bring to you. The Inner Healer has been operating all along in you, yet most of the time you just cannot hear it because there is TOO much ‘static’ in between you and this internal wisdom. And sometimes the message gets garbled by the time it gets to you. Communication with your Inner Healer is about establishing a relationship, a dialogue. One that is created in awe, respect, possibility and an unreasonable desire to live a life not grid-locked down by fear, the past or what ‘might’ happen.

At some level each of us must learn to accept and honor our own journey and what it has brought us along our path. Often the only choice we really have is also the best choice for healing, presence.