How to Change Your Mind, and Make It Last

“I have been truly blessed by my rich medical experiences and now look forward to sharing what I have learned – health, and real primary care, is connection to self, connection to others and connection to the world. Connection is the key to health and happiness and it CAN be felt, taught and, most importantly, held and shared.”    —  Dr. Mark Kalina 

The quest for true transformation is universal and powerful. Much of the “suffering” inherent in life, of which the Buddha described as inherent in the human experience, CAN be transcended. While the medical and modern technological worlds enticingly offer quick-fix, instant gratification solutions, the real and lasting answers come from inside. The transformation – the changing of the mind from inner battle and self-disapproval to peace and self-acceptance – is a challenge that requires a process and support, a neuroplastic re-wiring of circuitry and neurochemical stabilization.

We live in a miraculous time where both the neuroscience of the brain and body, as well as the power of movement/exercise, beliefs, emotions, psychology and spirituality, are all evolving to higher levels of understanding. Seismic changes now happen in science and human experience at miraculous paces and rates.

The key to embodying this miracle – the miracle of life – rather than just trying to understand it intellectually, is to CONNECT.

Connect to the energy of each moment. Connect to whatever spiritual/religious/unifying force resonates with your soul. Connect and be in and love the body despite its multitude of imperfections and seeming betrayals. Connect to your relations – family and friends and foes and the other infinite non-human beings who we share this miracle with. Connect to the quiet. Connect to the chaos. Own it all and be with it all, especially the hard parts.

Although this sounds massive and impossible, it is not. It is simple and impossible at the same time.  Each breath is a new opportunity for this integrated vision.  Of course, some moments will be failures while others triumph. That’s the ride and the key — accepting every win, loss and tie as part of the ultimate plan.

Lasting change and human transformation, as opposed to empty, failed resolutions and stagnant living, are our birthright. Behold the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. If transformation is possible for this being, why not all of us? What allows change is to go into the body regularly/daily and with intention – to embody – to witness without attaching and getting stuck on the barrage of ongoing thoughts and feelings, and instead to be guided by The Force that is beyond all individual comprehension. Opening to the possibility of the miraculous in every day life, on all planes, brings lasting, conscious evolution every day and each moment.

The only real question left is – if not now, when?

Contact gloria@eightelementswest.com for information on Dr. Kalina or I AM The Medicine.

Mark Kalina, MD, Pacific Pearl;  consultant, I AM The Medicine.
Training in Internal Medicine at UCSD during the AIDS era (before real treatment was available) while also ravenously studying and actively incorporating psychology, spirituality and integrative medicine in all its forms and fashions over the past 30 years, I have a burning passion to help bring a new consciousness to medicine, primary care, health and healing.

I currently work at Pacific Pearl in La Jolla where we are revolutionizing primary and secondary health care by means of an integrative team approach. My other projects of passion include group-based interventions for chronic illness care and reversal and improving the end-of-life experience.

My vision is and has been for 3 decades to change the paradigm of medicine to one based in love, oneness and internal power.