Before reading this article, we suggest you read Part I and Part II.

After reading the two previous featured articles in this series, by now you are starting to have awareness over your Upper Limits that hold you back. We all have them and as we mentioned in the last article, awareness is the first key step to breaking these limitations down and dismantling them. The next step is to find how and why we limit ourselves so that we can identify the barrier in our life and transcend them so we can move forward.

What most of us don’t realize is that we carry around a bunch of unconscious ideas of how happy we can be and psychologist (and best-selling author) Gay Hendricks, PhD talks a lot about Upper Limits and how we can learn to identify our self-imposed limitations to live the life we’re meant to be living.

After diving into the mind-body connection, emotions, trauma, the unconsious mind and neuroscience throughout the last five years, I’ve seen a level of healng in my body that was far too profound to not talk about with all of you. Yes, sure food can help you. Eat more kale and walnuts, take your vitamins, move your body, yada yada. But, the missing link that I believe is keeping people unwell and symptomatic is what’s lurking unconsciously in their mind from their past.

They’re stuck without even realizing it because they’re in their own way.

We can’t even see what’s blocking us from our potential whether it’s our health or our career or anything else for that matter.

This was shocking to me and a HUGE light bulb when off when I stumbled across this information through the hours of research, reading and working with healers, Shamans and many forms of energy work. No, I’ve never done therapy- maybe someday I will but I’m very unconventional and I chose to go another route and discover myself through different means (the suppressed energetic level of the body). For you, therapy may feel like the right move and if so, that’s amazing. We are all different and we’ve all been through drastically different experiences so you’ve gotta listen to your intuition and follow what feels good to you and your body. That’s KEY for healing. More on that later…

You see when we’re young (as I mention in Part II of this series), we are being programmed by everything outside of us. We’re in the subconscious theta brain wave state ages 0-7 and we’re a sponge, meaning we absorb everything we see and hear and feel because we don’t get know what’s really going on via TV, media, our caregivers, teachers, friends, etc. At the ripe age of 7, we move out of the theta brain wave state and into a more conscious state, which means our subconscious is pretty much locked and stored away for the rest of our life.

What many people don’t realize (and what I work very closely with my clients on) is getting to the subconscious mind to discover what’s lurking in there that’s playing out in our lives without our conscious awareness. 95% of the activity in your brain is subconscious, which means that our subconscious mind runs 95% of the show while our conscious mind only runs 5%. Think about how powerful that is. So, what you’re thinking about consciously right now is only 5% of the whole show going on in your head because there is another 95% that’s overpowering it and actually in charge of our habitual patterns, habits and thoughts. So, if you think positive for a little bit throughout your day to try to “improve your life”, the rest of the day you’re lost in your subconscious mind on autopilot and the conscious mind can’t compete with this.

Have you ever wanted to stop a habit and found it hard to do so no matter how positive you were or how much positive thinking you forced yourself to do? That’s because your subconscious mind was in the way self-sabotaging you from shifting that habit with its power that feels much different than you do consciously and doesn’t want to break that habit because it feels safe and the brain does not like change.

What this leads to is your conscious mind and subconscious mind being out of alignment, meaning, your life cannot work for you, your desires cannot manifest and you cannot create what you consciously want to experience because 95% of the time your conscious mind is not in charge. This is where the work begins as we start to realize we are the creators of our lives because we’re the only ones in our own way. When we’re armed with this knowledge and inner power, we can start to align our conscious mind and subconscious mind to manifest what we truly desire from deep within us. If you’re coming to one of my retreats or if you’re signed up for our retreat in North Carolina next month, you’re in luck because we’ll be walking through all of this material for three days and I’ll be sharing how to access what’s holding us back subconsciously from healing while transforming yourself. In all my years of healing, I have yet to come across anyone who truly understands what I have put together throughout the last decade and it brings me so much joy to be able to share it with you to help you elevate your life and get to the next level of yourself. 

For now, I want you to familiarize yourself with the baby steps so you can become aware of some of the unconscious things you’re doing in your life that are keeping you from healing and everything you want. 

When we start to see our own unconscious patterns of how we’re self-sabotaging ourselves, it becomes obvious to us that we may be eating healthy and working out for a few weeks then maybe we binge and feel bloated and blah and we have no idea why we did this to ourselves. Or maybe we’re always picking fights with other people so that we can play the ‘victim’ role and have others feel bad for us so that we get love and sympathy from them. I was guilty of the latter always wanting love from people and romantic relationships and I’d want to fight so that we could makeup and I would get a hug (to reinforce that I was loved). I had no idea I was doing any of this and I started to become aware of all of these patterns myself.

We all have an Upper Limit, as Hendricks calls it for how much love, creativity, and success we allow ourselves to enjoy.

This gets programmed in early childhood and guess where it’s hiding? Yep, you guessed it. In the subconscious mind, which is why talk therapy (which uses your conscious mind) isn’t helping you reprogram and install new patterns. This is KEY to healing and I’ve seen remarkable results in my clients and myself.

Again, I cannot stress enough about how important Self-Awareness is here. That is what’s going to help you start to identify these patterns. 

There are four hidden barriers with the Upper Limit Problem and they have a lot in common: they all SEEM very real but they are based on false beliefs and fears about ourselves. This is just an illusion because these beliefs and fears are NOT true; they are made up in our head. They seem real but they’re not true. They’re false limiting beliefs that we’re carrying around! So much of this will be covered in my upcoming retreat and of course, if you’re working with me one-on-one you know this is a huge part of the healing journey!

The 4 Upper Limit Barriers

Barrier 1 || Feeling Fundamentally Flawed.

We believe and think and feel we are flawed at our core and that we may fail if we use the unique gifts we have in life and actually listen to ourselves and trust ourselves with our health and chose alternative healing methods because we’ve been programmed to believe Western medicine is the only way.

Barrier 2 || Abandonment and Disloyalty.

We are afraid of being alone and abandoned we believe that if we chose another set of beliefs such as alternative medicine or if we stop drinking or start eating healthy that our family, spouse, co-workers will make fun of us and exclude us and not love us anymore because we’re “different”

Barrier 3 || Believing You’re a Burden.

This goes without saying. We think we’re a burden to others if we actually do follow our heart and do what we know is the right thing to do.

Barrier 4 || Outshining.

Ahhhh we know this far too well and it certainly has to do with healing-not just our career or dating or anything else. When we’re unwell, we bond with others who are unwell and when we start to heal and feel better and others do not, we start to feel shame and guilt and like we’re doing something wrong even though we know deep down inside this is what we want and have been wanting for so long!

Knowing these four barriers, start paying attention to where you are worrying and where you are blaming and criticizing yourself and others.

Become an observer of when you’re critical and when you hear and feel critical statements coming out of your mouth or when they pop up in your mind. Start to have awareness for them and identify them and ask yourself what you’re believing. Is it true what you’re believing or did you pick this up from the media, caregivers, parents, friends, teachers, social media etc. in your past? Chances are, it’s the latter.

Diving deeper into yourself to discover these barriers to health and happiness and success and everything that you want will allow you to start seeing all the ways you’re limiting yourself and holding yourself back from what you want to experience in life.

When you are finally willing to be true to yourself and willing to look at all the beliefs blocking you from the future you desire, you no longer have to hang out with the part of you that tells you to play small, be safe, and sell out because you’re ready for a new future that’s nothing like your past.

If you’re interested in learning more about this process and the next steps, we’d love to have you join us for our retreat next month in North Carolina or you can book a private session with Amie. 

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The post Why Staying “Safe” Makes You Feel Stuck & How to Move Forward Part III appeared first on Amie Valpone.

We suggest you read Part I before you start this featured article.

Fear is just an illusion.

That’s all it is. It’s a series of distorted thoughts in our mind and it’s just an illusion. Once I told myself this on a daily basis, I started to break out of my old fear-based mentality. I felt my body and mind start to expand and I was finally ready enter the real world after being cooped up for a decade healing my body.

Many of us have a tolerance for feeling good so when we hit that Upper Limit of feeling amazing and healthy, we create thoughts and behave in ways that make us feel awful. Hello self-sabotage! We’re scared. We feel fear creep in…or maybe we don’t even realize fear creeps in because it’s unconsciously driving us. Once I realized this, I started to analyze my life on a much deeper level. Where else was I doing this? With my health, with romantic relationships, with many things. As soon as anything in life started to get really good, I got scared and pulled back and ‘stayed safe’ in my comfort zone. I constantly kept myself busy so I didn’t have to look at those feelings and I didn’t have to move forward with my life. I could stay ‘safe’ and comfy where I was.

When I started to have awareness for what I was unconsciously doing, I took a step back and thought about what was really happening here. I soon learned how to get rid of those thoughts that stopped the flow of the good energy and allowed myself to feel that I deserved to feel amazing and healthy every day just like everyone else. By sitting with these feelings, my life started to transform because I could then witness anytime I was doing this self-sabotage game of ‘staying safe’ in my comfort zone. I started to transcend it all so that I could keep moving forward and start living a ‘real life’ without the need for medical support or energy work on a daily basis.

The funny thing is that this ‘staying safe’ never happened with my career or the foods I ate. Those just run smoothly for me; I’m not blocked there. However, I was blocked in many other places. It was mostly with my health and romantic relationships; I had so much fear of being healthy and what that actually felt like. I had so much fear about being in a romantic relationship with an amazing man who was everything I’ve ever wanted because I’ve been hurt before so the thought of opening up my heart was terrifying.

According to Gay Hendricks, PhD,”Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. That thermostat setting usually gets programmed in early childhood. And, once programmed, our Upper-Limit thermostat setting holds us back from enjoying all the love, financial abundance and creativity that’s rightfully ours.”

Mind-blowing, right?

Our childhood programming sets us up for life. This is why so much of the work I do with my clients is focusing on the unconscious mind because that’s where all the clues are from what we believed and experienced in our childhood that are still playing out unconsciously in our lives today!

It’s wild how diving into learning more about yourself and the psychology of why you do the things you do, can change your entire life. It’s all about awareness. Self-awareness, to be more specific. This has been life changing for me.

As Hendricks talks about in his work, the Upper Limit Problem has four hidden barriers and even though they may seem real, they’re based on false beliefs and fear about ourselves. Why we unconsciously accept them as being real is what actually holds us back and keeps us ‘safe’ in our comfort zone. When we wake up and become conscious of these imaginary barriers we created for ourselves, they dissolve and we become free and ALIVE.

I’ll be talking about those four hidden barriers in Part III coming soon. I’m not including them in this feature because from my own personal experience, I believe it’s important to give you this information in pieces so that you can really start to sit with it and digest it. From now until the last part of this series comes out in a few weeks, start to have awareness for what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and what’s keeping you ‘safe’ when you know it’s just fear acting as an illusion in your mind. Write down what you start to have awareness about in your journal or in a note app on your phone to keep track of them. I use Evernote on my phone.

You’ll be quite surprised how many unconscious things start to pop up and become conscious in your mind. You’ll be amazed that you didn’t realize you were unconsciously doing any of this to yourself to keep you ‘safe’. The part that really makes my clients interested in this work is that they soon start to realize that their childhood programming set them up and well, “programmed” them with the beliefs they’re still carrying around today that are limiting beliefs and aren’t even true and keeping them stuck and unwell. Most of them are based in fear, which we now realize is nothing but an illusion. So, you can do the math here!

By the time Part III of this featured series comes out, you’ll have the opportunity to address each of these barriers you’re writing down that hit your Upper Limit so that you can start to move forward with them and expand your life. It’s quite magical when you do this work. I’m living proof.

The first step is Awareness. There is so much goodness that comes out of being self-aware for why you do what you do!

We hope all of this is making sense to all of you. Let us know if you have any questions down below in the comments section. We’d love to hear your thoughts and what’s popping up for you that you weren’t conscious of.

Do you see yourself setting Upper Limits in your life with your health and relationships and the foods you eat?

Continued in Part III…

Upcoming Retreat

If this feature resonated with you, I’d love to have you join me for my last retreat of 2018, The Experience: Discover the Missing Pieces Keeping You from Optimal Health, Weight & Happiness.

Now, for the first time ever, I’m sharing my next level of work with you to help you improve the quality of your life and empower you to learn how to take your health into your own hands. In this fun, interactive and relaxing three-day retreat for women of all ages, Amie’s focus will be on nourishment, embodiment and empowerment, not deprivation.

This retreat will unlock what’s holding you back from feeling your best while addressing the missing pieces that are affecting all of us on a cellular level.

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The post Why Staying “Safe” Makes You Feel Stuck & How to Move Forward Part II appeared first on Amie Valpone.

Click the PLAY button below to listen.

Email us at Hello@TheHealthyApple.com with your questions for the next Dear Amie column, which will be in the fall. Today’s topic is one of the most popular questions I receive from my readers on a weekly basis.

Q:

HOW DO YOU GET THROUGH A CHRONIC HEALTH ISSUE(S) WHILE WORKING A JOB, HANDLING YOUR FAMILY AND OTHER FRIENDSHIPS, DATING/BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP, PAYING FOR MEDICAL BILLS, DEALING WITH DOZENS OF CONFLICTING ADVICE FROM DOCTORS, AND HANDLING HOSPITALS? AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, HOW DO YOU STAY SANE DURING THIS ENTIRE PROCESS?

A:

Upcoming Retreat

If this feature resonated with you, I’d love to have you join me for my last retreat of 2018, The Full Body Transformation: Discover the Missing Pieces Keeping You from Optimal Health, Weight & Happiness.

Now, for the first time ever, I’m sharing my formula, The Experience, with you to help you improve the quality of your life and empower you to learn how to take your health into your own hands. In this fun, interactive and relaxing three-day retreat for women of all ages, Amie’s focus will be on nourishment, embodiment and empowerment, not deprivation.

This retreat will unlock what’s holding you back from feeling your best while addressing the missing pieces that are affecting all of us on a cellular level.

I truly hope to see you there! xx

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The post Dear Amie || Summer 2018 appeared first on Amie Valpone.

(aka): Playing small.

(aka): Thinking you’re not good enough to do whatever the heck it is that you are passionate about. Whatever it is that your soul is pulling you towards. You know the feeling. We all know the feeling. But how many of us actually listen to it? We’re often too busy pushing those feelings and passions away so that we can be logical (because that’s how many of us were raised–to only use our logical mind) and then we end up being miserable in life and feeling stuck. And we wonder why we’re feeling stuck.

So, why does this happen?

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Because we get scared to move forward/try something new and we want to stay ‘safe’ in our bubble of what we know.

It goes for anything.

Not wanting to interview for a new job to get to the next level. Not wanting to leave your hometown to move somewhere that’s not familiar to you. Not wanting to break up a relationship for fear that you won’t find someone who’s right for you. Not wanting to go to a party because you don’t feel like you’re pretty enough. Not wanting to public speak because you don’t think you’re good enough. Not wanting to approach a good looking guy because you don’t think you’re thin enough. Etc, etc, etc. You get the picture.

It all comes down to two things we all have inside of us.

Fear.

And.

Safety.

We like to keep everything safe and ‘okay’ because that’s a safe, stable, low maintenance place to be. The alternative?

To engage in a fulfilled life and listen to your heart. This route has its challenges, which is what’s scary for many of us but it’s the journey to feeling fulfilled and ALIVE in life. That is worth it. Trust me.

You see, each of us has ingrained, unconscious ideas of how good we are and how successful we can be in life. Psychologist, Gay Hendricks, calls these “Upper Limits” and has shared many suggestions on how to identify and transcend these self-imposed limits that we put on ourselves.

Hendricks says that to make leaps in our life, we must learn to identify and transcend our Upper Limit, wherever and whenever we encounter it.

“I haven’t met a person yet who didn’t suffer at least a little bit from what I call the Upper-Limit Problem. Even if you’re already extravagantly successful, I’m sure that your own version of the Upper-Limit Problem is still holding you back from achieving your true potential,” he says.

Hendricks states that we often create painful images because we are feeling good. So, when something good happens, we are afraid of enjoying the positive energy for a long period of time. When we reach this Upper Limit of how much goodness we can handle, we create numerous painful thoughts to deflate ourselves. What these painful thoughts do is make us return back to an emotional state that we are more familiar with (aka not feeling good).

This can happen with anything in life such as healing after a decade of chronic illness and entering back into the real world, which is what happened to me last year. I was so used to feeling awful and so used to feeling pain IN my body and IN my mind that I started to expect these feelings and I started to put myself back into that state to feel ‘safe’ even though I was starting to feel better and heal. I noticed this, which is a huge step, to begin with, and since I was aware of what I was doing, I made sure to seek out energy workers and mind/body practices to help me move forward.

I remember feeling stuck.

I felt like I couldn’t move forward in my life because the thought of being a normal person in the real world was scary and also made me feel like an adult, which was so scary, as well. I had been sick since I was 22 and at 33, I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I started realizing that I had shut out everyone from my life because I was in so much pain and in survival mode just trying to survive everyday-let alone feed myself, bathe myself and keep up with my business.

Now that I was healing, my body and my mind were opening up to the real world and I was scared. Hello fear. I only thought fear was like ‘fear of heights’ or ‘fear of lions, tigers and bears’ but what I didn’t realize was that this was a real fear that I had inside of me and I had to address it if I wanted to move forward in my life to fully heal and be a normal woman in a normal world, to get back into the dating world and to do things like go to movies and non-work events and to just have FUN. I was scared to have FUN.

Can you believe that? I’m like a ball of fun but I was so nervous that I didn’t deserve it because I had suffered for so long. Guess what was holding me back?

Fear, fear, fear.

Continued in Part II…

Upcoming Retreat

If this feature resonated with you, I’d love to have you join me for my last retreat of 2018, The Experience: Discover the Missing Pieces Keeping You from Optimal Health, Weight & Happiness.

Now, for the first time ever, I’m sharing my NEW method, The Experience, with you to help you improve the quality of your life and empower you to learn how to take your health into your own hands. In this fun, interactive and relaxing three-day retreat for women of all ages, my focus will be on nourishment, embodiment and empowerment, not deprivation.

This retreat will unlock what’s holding you back from feeling your best while addressing the missing pieces that are affecting all of us on a cellular level.

I truly hope to see you there! xx

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The post Why Staying “Safe” Makes You Feel Stuck & How to Move Forward Part I appeared first on Amie Valpone.

You may feel like no one is listening to you, that no one understands you and that doctors are just guessing about what’s going on inside your body. I get it. I was there for far too long feeling helpless and blah. That’s when I threw away all my medical books and embarked on a deeper journey to heal myself on a level I didn’t even know existed. And that’s exactly when these mind body books came into my life.

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This journey has brought me to a place where I’ve learned about the unconscious mind, trauma, experiences that keep our body in fight/flight mode and so much more. I have hundreds of books in my home that I’ve read in the last few years but these stuck out as my favorites and they were life changing for me.

I could easily list hundreds of books here but I’m only going to list a few that I believe you should start with. I’ll be sharing more as time goes on to help you grow into the woman you’re meant to be. For now, I hope they inspire you and bring you to a place of calm and healing.

Enjoy.

xx

Letting Go by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

One of my favorite doctors, Dr. Jeffrey Morrison, told me to read this book about 5 years ago. This book started my journey beyond medicine and into the mind-body connection. It’s fascinating and beautiful because it starts to allow you to create awareness in your mind for all the things you’re doing and holding onto that you’re not conscious of. I highly recommend you start with this book. It will change your life and the way you look at things and think about things.

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

I could read this book 10 more times and still enjoy it. I read this book a few years ago and it had a profound impact on my life. Michael Singer calls that voice inside our head that talks to us all day long, our “roommate” and he helps us separate ourselves from that voice so that we know who we truly are and so that we can live a healthy and happy life without being a victim to what which we think we are! Fascinating and life changing for sure.

The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, M.D.

This book will blow your mind. Bruce Lipton is brilliant because he’s discovered that our beliefs are actually what affect our genes, which means that our belief systems (that we’re programmed with from childhood and throughout our lives from our parents, teachers, TV, social media, etc.) are what make us sick. This book is remarkable and I highly suggest you dive into Dr. Lipton’s work. He is by far one of the smartest doctors I’ve ever heard because he connects the mind-body and shows people what is really making them unwell!

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The post The Best Mind Body Books appeared first on Amie Valpone.