THE HEALING PARADOX: How My Insomnia Taught Me Secrets to Living an Abundant Life

It was 4 a.m. one night, and I was lying in a hospital bed thinking, “THIS IS IT… I’m done… there’s nothing more I can try.” I could feel the burning rage boiling inside… hate for myself, my insomnia, my life, my failure. Just an hour earlier I had called 9-1-1 thinking I was having a heart attack, only to find out it was a panic attack. My body was revolting against me.

I was replaying in my mind the last 2 years of hell… lost jobs, lost friends, sabotaged relationships, constant depression, social anxiety, fatigue, a tornado of worry and anxiety upon laying down to “try” to sleep, the inevitable 3 a.m. fit of fury, punching the pillow and screaming, “Why me???”

My insomnia had me defeated. I had tried everything, and nothing had worked. I thought I might as well give up now on happiness. I was drained, spent, and just plain exhausted.

It started a few years ago with a couple of restless nights, then slowly spiraled into an every night war against my insomnia. I’d lie down, and suddenly become filled with anxiety. By 3 a.m., my mind would be racing with thoughts like, “I don’t know how I’ll get through tomorrow unless I get at least four hours of sleep!” I’d try not to stare at the clock, but when I closed my eyes, the clock would appear before me, taunting me, counting down the remaining time I had to sleep.

 

I spent hours each day reading, researching, trying to find answers. But everyone said the same thing… don’t drink coffee, don’t watch TV in bed, take melatonin, etc.… I’m sure you know the drill.

I tried sleeping pills.
I tried supplements.
I tried ebooks.
I tried therapy.
I tried changing my sleeping environment.
I spent thousands of dollars.

Some things seemed to help for a short time, but the problem was still there, rotting inside of me. I was accumulating a Library of Congress-size repertoire of materials, tools, and techniques, but the root of the problem was still there.

Lying in that hospital bed, a mysterious surrender washed over me. I had hit a wall. I felt there was nothing more I could do, nothing more I could try. Every article, blog or book was saying the same thing. I’d done it all. And I still wasn’t sleeping.

If you’ve ever experienced insomnia, I’m guessing there’s a good chance you can relate. Insomnia is like an insidious computer virus. It gets into your mainframe and wreaks havoc. Systems go haywire. You try to shut down, but you’re stuck in an endless spinning cycle.

But in that moment of sudden total surrender, I discovered something. I had an epiphany. In a split second my entire paradigm of the human body and its potential was turned upside down. It was as if I rebooted into an entirely different operating system, launching new software for my health, my life path, my happiness… everything.

What I discovered is that my insomnia was due to unresolved emotion. But it doesn’t just stop there; I discovered that any emotional energy we hold inside is immediately manifested into vibrational, electrical, and chemical changes in the physical body. It could be energetic garbage from years in the past, or from that knee-jerk emotion you just felt from a snarky comment your boss made while passing by.

This is the Law of Vibration; “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” We are vibrational beings, and science proves that vibrational energy transfers. Just place a speaker on your desk, and you’ll feel your desk begin to vibrate to the music.

See, Western Medicine has gotten it all wrong. It’s backward, upside down, sideways… all ways but up.

The Macmillan Dictionary defines Western Medicine as, “the type of medical treatment that is the most popular in North America and Western European countries, based on the use of drugs and surgery to treat symptoms (=signs of illness).”

So what’s the problem? I’ll lay it out plainly: we’re overly focused on the symptoms. In fact, we’re stuck in this self-perpetuating feedback loop I’m calling the Healing Paradox.

But before I continue I’d like to be clear; I’m not advocating dropping Western Medicine. I’m advocating revising how both patients and doctors view the paradigm of healing. As with anything, there’s always room for improvement. And the beautiful thing about the Healing Paradox is that regardless of your doctor’s approach, you can harness it to unleash better health from within. It’s all about realizing that YOU have the power to invigorate your body’s systems of healing.

This is not just a prevailing problem in medicine. It permeates nearly all areas of our common everyday existence. It’s time for a reboot; I’ll explain why.

Think about how we are trained to approach any problem in life:

1. You decide you want something. You have been taught that the more effort you put into it, the more likely you will be to succeed.
2. You consult your mind for answers:
   Who is going to give it to me?

   How am I going to get it?

   When will it be here?
3. Then, after not seeing the results you want:
   Why is it taking so long?
   What is preventing me from having it?
   What more do I need to do to get it?
4. If you can’t get the solution you were looking for, your mind beats you up for not being “good enough” or for some other reason why you are “less-than.”
5. With the reinforced sense of limitation your mind just bestowed upon you, you return to step 2 in search of a new solution. The cycle repeats.

Sound familiar? Yes! We all do this

Our education system trains us to engage only our analytic mind for answers any time we are faced with a problem. We consult our past memories to determine which lessons can apply to the present issue. When we cannot achieve our goal by accessing and acting on past knowledge, we are made to feel stupid by being ridiculed with bad marks and grades.

What this has done is build up our sense of limitation. The lack of control. The sense that we have been served this life by luck or “deservance,” and that you can try to make a change, but most likely your actions will be futile.

This loop of limitation is the vicious cycle that so many find themselves stuck in. And it’s at its worst when related to a health issue, especially when you’ve been told it’s serious, because it’s a life-or-death fight to prevail.

So the first half of the Healing Paradox is this: when faced with a health problem, we assume the mentality of “more action equals better results.” Here’s what approach you might take:

1. You decide that this health problem needs to be resolved. You feel that the more effort you put into it, the more likely you will be to succeed.
2. You go to the doctor, who examines your symptoms and perhaps prescribes you a medication to address those symptoms.
3. You return home, sit on the couch, and wait for your symptoms to resolve. You hold your problem in your mind as you quietly monitor what is happening.
4. If the issue does not resolve, you return to the philosophy of “more effort”.
5. You might take more of the medication. You might search the internet for answers. You might find a solution someone has reported success with. You try it.
6. From the moment you begin acting on your new solution, your mind is monitoring its results.
7. But you don’t see much improvement, so you must try harder. You return to the internet for answers.
8. Repeat cycle… indefinitely.

This is the cycle I found myself in repeatedly. I was so lost in the symptoms, in the monitoring, that I was literally causing them to persist. My insistent commitment to the prescribed philosophy “more effort = more results” doomed me from the beginning. I was perpetuating my own suffering. If I found myself in a moment without discernible symptoms, my mind would immediately search for them, and invariably find them.

One of the Healing Paradox’s greatest tricks is keeping you in search of the symptoms. Your mind chases your symptoms, so much so that you keep them in view. The secret is that if you would just allow them to run, without giving notice to where they’re going, they might just run off into the horizon and out of the range of perception.

So let’s go back to the Law of Vibration, that everything you do (and feel) alters your cellular vibration. When you’re excited, like truly over the moon, you feel a god-like power fueling you from within. Ever notice that? But when you’re depressed, that inner fuel is running on fumes. A simple shift in emotion can instantly take you from bursting with energy to fatigued and sluggish.

Well, the same applies to physical symptoms as it does emotions. The more thought-energy you focus on a symptom, the more guaranteed it is to exist in your reality. The act of noticing keeps it in your range of perception.

There’s a quote I often cite by the great American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson – “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” The reason why I enjoy this quote so much is that it so clearly conveys this notion of manifestation. We’re literally manifesting our reality all day long with the thoughts we entertain.

When I was in the trenches of my insomnia, it consumed me. I viewed everything in my life as a challenge, because I was surely going to be too tired to function or perform. And you know what, it WAS a challenge! Every waking moment of the day insomnia was on my mind. I had taken the label of insomnia, and quite literally embodied it.

You may be thinking, “But these are symptoms of insomnia – of course I’m going to be tired and life is going to be hard!”

The problem with that thinking is it’s counterproductive. Giving any health condition so much focus builds an energy system around it. It gives it power. But the fact is, your body is an instrument of your mind, and will adapt to your thought-energy. Your body literally changes its chemical balance, and your brain changes its neural pathways.

If you think of something that causes you stress, you’ll produce stress chemistry in your brain. You’ll produce higher levels of cortisol and adrenalin in your bloodstream, and cause increased blood to flow to your major muscles. If you think in this way consistently, then your brain will actually re-wire itself to develop neural pathways that facilitate this mode of thought. This is widely accepted science. With every thought, you are creating your health.

So here’s the second half of the Healing Paradox: the real way to self-heal is to flip your perspective. Know your own inner healing power. Believe in it. Go to the doctor to take care of the health of your physical body, but take responsibility for the health of your mind. Help the healing of your body by focusing your thought-energy on health, instead of your current problems, symptoms, and worries. As you go about your day, hold this in your mind. Take moments to stop and revel in it; enjoy the thought of it so much that you actually feel the joy.

This is why I call it the Healing Paradox. Because this is exactly opposite of how we are conditioned to think. To most people, it sounds completely idiotic to overlook symptoms and to focus on an imaginary image of health. Most people will flat out argue, or even scream, that this is just ludicrous.

But this is how I cured my insomnia. And this is happening every day with all types of health problems, even the most terminal.

The secret is, when you begin doing this consistently, keeping your mind suspended in a state of perfect health, your body is sure to follow. This is the placebo effect in action. Nobody disputes the placebo effect, but what they do is write it off as an anomaly. But the placebo effect is NOT an anomaly; it’s the Healing Paradox in action. YOU can become a master at the placebo effect, because all it takes is belief and consistency.

Along my journey I’ve followed many self-healers, people who have made a public display of their journey with a certain ailment, hoping that the broadcasting of that journey will help others. I see the first half of the Healing Paradox in so many of them. They dedicate their YouTube channel to find the natural cure. But in this dedication they perpetuate their condition. In fact, they perpetuate the condition in their loyal followers as well, because everyone is participating in the celebrating of the symptom. Two years later, dozens of “cures” attempted, and they are still suffering. Or even worse off. And they’re probably earning money from the effort, so they have literally engineered their suffering into a sustenance they rely on.

If we could just realize that everything should start in the mind, we would achieve our goals so much more quickly. Because once you are centered in an unwavering allowing of your natural inner potential, you have laid a foundation for change. You have become a channel for health and abundance. Then, whatever physical action you take will be charged with the source energy of creation, of infinite possibility, of complete wholeness.

By all means, please keep your doctor in your circle of health. Conventional medicine has its place, and it is irresponsible and potentially very dangerous to ignore this aspect of healing. But don’t forget to take care of your mind. It must always begin in the mind.

For those interested in learning more about how to unleash your infinite potential in all aspects of your life, I curate a free weekly abundance program that delivers lessons, hacks, downloads, experiments, and more to your inbox. It’s 100% free and is my passionate pursuit to share the wisdom and knowledge I have learned, and continue to learn, along my journey with unleashing my potential. I am also close to launching my new book on beating insomnia, which I will announce to my subscribers. If you are interested, sign up for free here.