Your Greatest Gift … Comes From Your Deepest Wound

by Health and Wellness Coach, Lori Daniel Falk

911 … all you have to do is say those 3 numbers and everyone has a visceral reaction. 9/11 was a time when everyone sat up and took notice and said we need to change things up a bit. We need to come together and create a new world, a new way of being. It impacted everyone differently, but it definitely impacted every one of us.

I know it impacted me dramatically. That was the week I joined Living Spirit Church and met Rev. Sheila Graves. In one of our earliest interactions she told me, “Lori, your greatest gift comes from your deepest wound.” I had no idea what that meant at the time, but today I do. Let me explain …

That deep wound began when I was only 18 years old and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a radical mastectomy, followed by the ups and downs of radiation and chemotherapy … my father walked into my room one day and handed me a manila envelope that was filled with all kinds of alternative treatments for cancer … With tears in his eyes, he said to me, “I think there’s something in here that can help your mother.” I tried and tried to read the research, and each time I did, my eyes glazed over, it was way too over my head. I was the English major, not the science girl. I was the girl that was going to write and create … not be involved in science… or so I thought.

Needless to say, as a young naive girl, when my mom passed on a few years later, I had a nagging sense of guilt over not getting through that medical research. Wondering and wondering if in fact there might have been something in there that would have made a difference. Something that would have helped her to heal, perhaps even to survive. While I’ll never know the answer to that question, I do know it was part of the journey that lead me to my greatest gift.

You see when the proverbial s–t hit the fan in my own life, and I attempted to go down the traditional medicine path alone, my life only spiraled farther and farther downward. It wasn’t until I tried a holistic approach to the extreme chronic fatigue and clinical depression I was experiencing that things began to turn around. I dove in with eyes and ears wide open and learned everything I could about organic foods, nutritional supplements, proper food combining, diet and nutrition and eventually emotional healing. I studied anything and everything that can help people heal holistically.

In the midst of all of this I asked God to show me what I was here for. I prayed and I waited. I prayed some more and I again waited.  Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, I was divinely led to become a Spiritual Life Coach and subsequently a Visionary Artist.  The work I do today is actually based on the Science of Epigenetics (yup I said science) … To put it simply, epigenetics is the study of cellular and physiological trait variations that are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. Scientists have proven with study after study that it is not the DNA alone that creates disease, rather it’s the beliefs passed on from generation to generation that are held in our subconscious programming, that create our health and well being.  Dr. Bruce Lipton, who is regarded as one of the leading voices of this new biology, tells us that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts, emotions and beliefs.

For years my dear friend and holistic practitioner, Mark Brown, PhD., and I had argued about the importance of having patients look at the emotional components behind the diseases they were contracting. Then one day Mark was diagnosed with a brain tumor. That was the day he finally agreed with me. You see Mark had done everything physically possible to take care of his health and yet he somehow contracted cancer. He finally agreed. He admitted he had not completed his own emotional healing work and he was now ready to continue that journey … Unfortunately by then it was too late as he was already losing cognitive functioning.  For me, the awareness of the importance of emotional healing work once again increased.

While researching all of this I had an opportunity to revisit that deep wound of mine … Now that I was finally capable of understanding this science, I could look back at my mother’s diagnosis and the emotional trauma that very well may have led to her disease … You see cancer of the left breast generally stems from an emotional conflict with one’s mother. They say the trauma generally occurs approximately 18 months to two years prior to initial diagnosis. So thinking back to when I was 16, I remembered this was when my mother found out through a very bizarre series of events that she was nearly illegitimate … that her parents had married only six short weeks before she was born. She was devastated by this news … her heart was broken. She felt unloved and unwanted and was absolutely sure that these thing she had believed her entire life … now seemed ever so true.

What’s craziest to me as I’m recounting all of this to you some thirty years later are the memories of me sitting on the floor in the family room talking to my mom while she was doing what she always was doing, “cleaning a clean house.” (Pun intended … seriously, if only she had worked on cleaning up her limiting beliefs rather than our already clean home, who knows … But alas, no one did these things in that era. Ah yes, I digress 😉 So what do you think we were talking about in that family room back then? Seriously, I was literally begging her to change her beliefs. I have absolutely no logical explanation, you know I wanted to say “no idea” ~ but then that wouldn’t really be true ~ as to how/why I was saying this to her, but I kept saying, “Mom,  you have to shift that belief that you’re going to die, you have to believe it’s possible for yourself to heal.” Oh if only I had known then, what I know now … I’d have been a young Maestro of Epigenetics and tired to help her find that “subconscious belief” that had created it all in the first place … and perhaps she’d still be with us today. (A girl can dream can’t she?)

While I can’t tell you for certain that this trauma with my grandma created my mother’s disease … What I can tell you is there’s a reason my dad put that folder on my desk when I was 18 … and there’s a reason that God keeps putting this information in front of me … there’s a reason that I have friends who are doctors in both the traditional and holistic medical field who are not only listening, they are paying attention to this research. They are realizing it’s time to do things differently, that it’s time for a health care 911.

And so while I can’t make you any promises
I can offer you one thing and that is hope …

• Hope that diseases are not just DNA ailments …
• Hope that there’s a nontraditional approach that will help …
• Hope that at the end of the day, if we look at these emotional conflicts … and we heal them, we will not only be happier …

Our immune systems will function better … And when the immune system is operating at an optimal efficiency level the chances of us contracting any type of disease is greatly lessened.