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"In many ways, life itself is a continual process of healing, of moving toward balance and wholeness in the midst of change." -- Martin Rossman, MD

How does a chronic disorder, disease, illness, or condition fit into your bigger life picture? How can you use a big picture approach to healing? In other words, what should you do, when chronic symptoms get your attention?

Chronic illness ? disorder or disease - is very different from short-term discomfort. It is there 24/7. You can?t just take off a few days in bed and expect things to return to normal quickly. The problems that your illness raises are there all the time.

You may try, but your life bogs down ? it is not really business as usual. Nonetheless, following along the same mindset that conventional drugs encourage for short-term health problems, you usually take medicines to force your chronic symptoms to stop bothering you. And the medicines themselves often have undesirable side effects. Sometimes it seems like an inescapable nightmare.

Sometimes people try to use even alternative medicine to cover over chronic symptoms, rather than fixing the problem It is important to consider that it is not just conventional drugs that can suppress your symptoms. If you go to an energy healer who does not understand the true meaning of "holistic" or whole systems, you may still experience suppressive treatment. The risk is that you just shove the illness process around your body and mind, blocking it from showing up one place only to have it pop up in another.

But if you step back to get a bigger picture of the situation, chronic health problems are part of life?s learning lessons. They are not romantic or fun ? but they certainly demand that you make changes. Chronic conditions are a message from your body to you and your higher self that elements of your life are out of balance.

What does that mean for you? Disease, disorder, health conditions are a part of your own personal growth process in this life. Resolve the issues that the health problem expresses, and you heal. Sometimes you can do this by will power alone, but most of the time it takes other kinds of help from systems of healing.

What can you do to get started toward healing?

A very simple but powerful step: Set the intention to heal.

Not just at the local level of where your symptoms happen to have shown up at this point in time, but rather, at the global level, YOU, the Big Picture.

You are calling upon the larger universe to work with you to fulfill your goal, whatever it might be. Some people call this "the attractor factor." Others call it using the power of intention. Leaders like Dr. Wayne Dyer have written whole books on the subject.

Set your own intention to heal inside and out at the highest possible level of your being, for the highest and best good.

Be positive, brief, and clear in what you say. Write it down and post the paper in a place where you can see it often during every day. Put your full emotional energy into the intention to heal as a whole being, one with a body, mind, and spirit.

What you will find is that things will start falling into place in expected and unexpected ways for you. You might run across a product in the health food store or hear about a new practitioner in town or finally join the yoga class that helps you get going on your own self-help program for this year. It will be many events and processes, internal and external, that will help the healing get started and keep going.

Setting the intention to heal is a powerful method that involves your whole being as an intact and indivisible system. Intention is the first and biggest step to take in developing a complete program or plan for your own personal healing.

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