Great day, New Day
This week I want to address a perfectly reasonable question about care that we sometimes may ask ourselves. If this care is so great, won’t there come a point when I “don’t need it anymore?”
It’s an unhealthy world
According to Donny Epstein, creator of Network Care and SRI, 90 percent of the world is in a stage 1 or stage 2 experience 90 percent of the time. That means that when you leave New Day, the people and situations you encounter may not be as uplifting as you would like.
Even though as you continue in care and you have a greater and greater capacity to positively affect those around you and improve important aspects your daily life, the world can still be a triggering place for our nervous systems.
Consider working out as an analogy. As long as we live in a world where sitting is our primary activity (sitting is the new smoking, by the way), where pizza and cake are our treats and rewards, and where the most activity we may get in a day is walking up the stairs to our condos, we will always need to work out.
Working out is the antidote to the horribly unhealthy culture we were born into. Similarly, your care is there to help counteract a world that is merciless on our spines. As long as you are living in that world, you are likely to want care for your spine.
You’re evolving
But unlike the analogy of working out just to maintain your health, you are actually getting better. Even when we find ourselves triggered and in pain in ways reminiscent of what originally brought us to care in the first place, we are different now than we were then. We have perspective.
Even when things get bad now, we know what’s on the other side of it. And besides, things probably never get as bad now as they used to seem to because our standards have gone up. We aren’t willing to accept what used to be “normal” to us.
Back to the analogy of working out. Let’s say you started working out mainly to burn the calories you ate and drank the night before. This goes on for a time, but eventually you’re getting healthier and you start to realize that working out isn’t just for burning calories. It’s for challenging yourself, doing different types of workouts, and trying to get better.
Your relationship to the care is changing as you get healthier. Allow it to continue to evolve. It may no longer make sense to think of care as what makes your pain go away. You are starting to notice other things your care is helping you with, and using your care accordingly.
Your “best self” keeps improving
As you continue to evolve and change, so does the way you use care. If getting out of pain used to be your mode of operation, you’re now able to sense the other ways the care is helping you.
Again, back to the analogy of working out. Let’s say you’ve been working out for years and it’s part of your life. You notice that working out helps turn your mood around on your bad days. You notice that working out on your good days makes you feel fantastic! Now, fantastic is what you’re going for, not just tolerable or good.
Network Care has a methodology for helping you evolve no matter where you’re at. Something doesn’t have to be “wrong” to engage in healing. Healing is something we do to optimize our health and maximize our experience in life. In fact, when we feel good and like “nothing’s wrong,” Network Care is one of the best things there is to help you raise your standards.
Why we continue our care
When Donny Epstein wrote the 12 Stages of Healing he conceptualized Stage 2 as that “all or nothing,” dualistic kind of energy. In Stage 2 we tend to feel we are either broken or fixed, getting better or getting worse, things are working or not working.
Why am I explaining this? Because everything about our modern culture promotes a stage 2 experience. We try something for a little while, think its great, and then we get bored and quit. Rinse and repeat. It would be difficult to avoid falling into this way of looking at things at least every once in a while, no matter how much care we are getting.
By breaking down the stages in the healing process and having specific ways to work with each stage, Network Care gives us the possibility for a breakthrough in this limiting belief. The practice of getting care over time opens us to the concept that although there may be ups and downs, we can be always evolving. And guess what? This breakthrough carries through to the rest of your life too.
Care is something you may do for many reasons, and those reasons may change over time. When we choose to continue care because of how it makes us feel and the richness it brings to our lives, we are in a truly empowered state.
