Mid-March 2019 Newsletter

Hello, and a merry magical Mid-March to you!
Welcome, or welcome back, to my newsletter. Today's issue is about family patterns you may not want to perpetuate. Enjoy!

As children, we copy our parents to learn how to function in the world. We take on their speech patterns, their facial expressions, their posture and way of walking, without even thinking about it. Usually this is helpful to us as we navigate our new environment, or harmless, or even cute. Picture a little boy swaggering just like his big strong father.

However, sometimes the habits we copy can hurt us. Maybe all the adult males in your family became alcoholics, or all the women are overweight. Is it a given that you have to go along with this trend? Yes, it can be difficult to resist family pressure, to be "the different one" at gatherings where it seems everyone else is indulging in unhealthy habits you don't want to copy, whether it's ingesting toxic substances or spewing toxic opinions. Is it possible that you're meant to be the good example for the younger ones to follow?

Scientific and medical research now show that many "inherited" diseases are no such thing. While you may inherit a tendency for a certain problem, what is much more of a factor in whether the problem manifests is your environment, not your genes. Hearing about this over and over is giving people great hope. Just because your mother or father came down with Dreaded Disease X does not mean you will. Your habits and lifestyle have much more to do with how healthy you are, and how long you live, than we previously realized.

The dreaded disease for me, what seemed like my life sentence, was extreme nearsightedness. My mother worried about "Nancy's bad eyes" from the time I was a small child. In my first visit to a behavioral optometrist 20 years ago, after decades of wearing very strong glasses and contact lenses, I was hoping against hope for some magic solution to this lifelong limitation. The eye doctor told me, "The good news is that you've got a lot of tension in your visual system". What?! Was it possible my only problem was tension and anxiety, not that I was doomed to live out my life with "bad eyes"?

The idea that I could reduce the strength of my contact lenses and maybe even see well enough to function without them was scary, and exciting. Who would I be? A major part of my identity, the way I thought of myself, was as Nearsighted Nancy. Was I willing to change that? I needed to learn how to let go of all the tension first. For the most part I have done this now, with the help of various energy practices like meditation and journaling, and self-care practices like regular exercise, a healthy diet, and enough restful sleep.

Years ago, I had an important insight in a conversation with a female acquaintance at our gym. She was educated and fit, but smoked cigarettes, which didn't make sense to me. I gently asked about it and she said, "Sometimes I feel like cigarettes are my only friend". I thought to myself that she needed to make some new friends! To change our direction on an unhealthy path, even if we had thought this path was our destiny, we will need to develop new habits to replace our unhelpful ones. And who is more worth doing that for than ourselves?

To see an article about "hereditary myopia" when it may be the straining habits of using your eyes which lead to this condition, click here.

Have you wondered if my work could help you?
I'm now offering complimentary Discovery Session consultations of 20 to 30 minutes, for us to discuss what you're looking for in a coach, and to see whether you and I feel like a fit. To schedule your Discovery Session, click here.

Do you want your own copy of future newsletters?
If a friend forwarded this to you, or you're reading it from Facebook or LinkedIn, this is a hit-or-miss method of receiving it, and you might not see it next time. If you'd like to be on my distribution list, you can join here. You can un-subscribe at any time. Thank you!

Please send me your questions and comments
Let me know what you've wondered about concerning energy medicine or vision or dreams. I'll be glad to write a short article addressing that topic. Thank you to those who have sent me questions, or see a question you asked me in a private session written about here. You're helping many other people! Enjoy the second half of your March. I'll write again in a couple of weeks. Take care!