In this interesting chat, Lee McCormick, a co-author of the Heart Reconnection Guidebook, shares the collective wisdom he and a group of conscious-connected friends created for heart-based healing. As in all the other episodes of The Autoimmune Show, this episode with Lee McCormick will inspire you to optimize your health regardless of your diagnosis and live the best life you can live. Share this link with family and friends www.UnderstandingAutoimmune.com/Lee

SHARON:  I love books where there are multiple authors and you get many insights and different points of view. Tell us a little bit about the inspiration for the book Heart Reconnection Guidebook.

LEE:  I have a group of friends and colleagues and some of them actually have been teachers of mine over the years.

Three years ago, we were all at a mental health addictions conference in Santa Fe and we were having a conversation around the outcomes of mental health addictions treatment like the true change that was happening in any kind of self-help world but primarily in the mental health addictions realm.

We all held the same point of view that the outcomes were not nearly good enough and that what would benefit this world would be a complete paradigm shift like looking at and questioning the foundation of what we believe, why we believe these things, and the basis for the messages that are being shared in the recovery realm and the mental health realm in, again, raising your life up.

Why are more people not living happy, joyous, and free? Why are more people not inspired to follow through and live authentic creative lives that they love waking up to?

SHARON:  Those are excellent questions. I like to say regardless of our diagnosis, absolutely important questions!

As you began to uncover with the conversations you had with your co-authors, what are a couple of the things that jumped at you as to why these people aren’t leading this joyous lives regardless of what’s going on?

LEE:  There were a number of things and they’re all interconnected, of course. One of the biggest issues that we face is anchored in our culture; and that is, growing up, we have been taught that if we have an issue, the way to find a solution to our issue is to find an “expert,” go to them for the answers, and accept whatever they offer you because they know and you don’t.

This is true in the medical healing aspect, and it’s true in the mental health aspect. It’s an aspect of our culture.

SHARON:  It’s so true. One of the things that we say here is about ─ I like to call it the “white coat authority” who offer us their best suggestions as well as statistics based on their expertise but that doesn’t mean you have to be one of the middle-of-the-road statistics or one of their fatalistic type of statistics.

We can always optimize. I love that because here in the autoimmune world, we talk a lot about “You know what you need best.”

LEE:  Exactly! As an aside, my wife actually had an autoimmune disease and she wrote a book called “My Kitchen Cure” and it did well. So while I’ve been working in the mental health addiction world for the last twelve years, I was living with her and she was addressing her challenges and her issues and her interface with the medical community and being offered all the immunosuppressant drugs as a cure to her autoimmune disease. She did her own research and took responsibility for her life in what she could change and do.

In the same way, the work I’ve done in the mental health addiction world has been about bringing people’s awareness to the truth. I don’t care how many experts you go to or how many other people give you an answer. You are always responsible for your choices; you’re the only expert in your life; and you’re the only one who has that direct connection to spirit, to creator, to that inner wisdom, and to your own heart and spirit. You’re the one who lives with that relationship and that relationship, ultimately, is the clearest source of awareness in our lives and in our choices.

I’m saying this from a basic level. It’s not religious at all. What I’m saying is that our body knows; and if we have deep abiding relationship with the wisdom of our body, there’s a whole lot of perspective available to us. There’s a greater sense of awareness available to us through our body.

SHARON:  Absolutely! If we stop and listen for a moment yet, sometimes, getting silent can be difficult. Do you have some tips on helping people tap into this greater wisdom that I found has led me to optimize my autoimmune experience?

LEE:  That’s a lot of what the Heart Reconnection Guidebook addresses. The wisdom of the body ─ the wisdom of the heart and soul ─ is rarely ever is a voice in our head… For me, you have a thought and you hear yourself thinking it. It’s in the hard drive of our mind. Our mind has been recording our whole life’s experience and our mind has been programmed with all this knowledge and all these beliefs and points of view. And so, culturally, we’re taught that if we want an answer to a question, you think about it. You go into your mind. You sit with it. You reason it out. And you listen to the voices in your head.

When we drop down into our heart and spirit, we drop down into that heart-centered relationship to ourself and our body. The answer is much more of a feeling. It’s an intuitive response as opposed to “Well, you should turn left ─ like a Google driving down the street response ─ and take a left and then a right.”

It’s intuitive. And you get a feeling about it. You know if you’re eating food that’s not good for your body. You can feel it if you have developed the ability to keep your attention and your awareness in your body.

Literally, it’s shifting the nature of our relationship with our attention. So when my mind is talking to me and I’m having a lot of thoughts, when I first got into this level of work on myself, when I was having a lot of thoughts, my attention naturally went straight into my head. I was listening to what I was thinking and I was focused on what I was thinking.

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For more inspiration and insight into intuition and listening to the needs of our body the complete interview with Lee is at  www.UnderstandingAutoimmune.com/Lee.

And, thank you for coming with us on another Q&A explorations. Have a great week whatever your adventures. And, join me next week for another episode of The Autoimmune Show each Friday night at 7PM ET.

Everyone, go make it a great day! Enjoy