Linda Martella-Whitsett - This Life Is Yours: Discover Your Power, Claim Your Wholeness, and Heal Your Life

Linda Martella-Whitsett and Alicia Whitsett

Copyright 2021
by Linda Martella-Whitsett and Alicia Whitsett

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Cover design by Kathryn Sky-Peck

Cover photograph by portishead1/Getty Images

Interior by Deborah Dutton

Typeset in Weiss and Avenir LT

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Charlottesville, VA 22906

Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

www.redwheelweiser.com

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ISBN: 978-1-64297-013-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Printed in Canada

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We dedicate this book to many beautiful beings
we have met who courageously claim wholeness
in the face of challenging conditions. Your
stories have encouraged us and empowered us to
share our own.

This is a book about healing yourself rather than curing a condition. Through healing, you can recover your whole self, your enlightened selfwhich is greater than anything you could imagine to be missing, wrong, or broken about you. We view healing as an intentional, continual self-directed practice that reconciles your fully human and fully spiritual natures. We believe you can heal yourself, no matter the circumstances.

You can begin by following this advice: Pause rather than rolling headlong in pursuit of a cure or your desired outcome. It is our experience that scrambling to find a solutionany solutionpropels you out ahead of yourself, in a sense, leaving yourself behind. We have learned that healing happens right where you are, on the inside, and that healing your life rather than your conditions is key to all that you truly desire. Your aim must be to become conscious about your life, to question your assumptions and beliefs, and to mine the rich ore of wisdom within as a guide for your next choices.

In this book, we address common questions about healing, some of which may be on your mind. Among these are:

• When I long for healing with a particular outcome in mind, how can I say it was successful if I do not achieve that outcome?
• Is it really healing if it's not just as I desired it to be?
• Is there a trick to healinga formula, a particular set of steps?
• Why is this happening to me? What caused it to happen and how long will the healing take?
• If I pray every day for healing without results, am I praying in the wrong way? Is there a right way to pray for healing?
• Is it worse to hope for a miracle than just to manage day by day? Isn't hoping futile?
• When time passes without my seeing the desired outcome, does it mean, as people say, that there must be something better in store?
• How can I be whole or complete and not feel it?
• If healing is in my hands, how can I increase my power to heal?

Throughout this book, we promise we will not tell you what we think you need to do. We believe the direction you take in healing is unique to you and that you have within you the wisdom and strength to determine what will be best for you. We hope, rather, to share many perspectives and possibilities, some of which you may not have contemplated before.

We will explore many spiritual principles that are unrelated to particular faith traditions. Our own tradition, the Unity Movement, was founded in metaphysical Christianity and teaches about our oneness with the divine. Spiritual practices like prayer and meditation are the tools we use to harness the power of our minds and transform our experience, pivoting awareness away from our concerns and toward our inner strengths. We refer to this capacity as the law of mind action, more commonly known nowadays as the law of attraction.

We encourage you to integrate our message into your own religious practices. Whether you have faith in a deity, subscribe to a higher power, or believe in the power of the human spirit, we offer our message as one that you can integrate into your understanding.

We are not medical professionals and we will not discuss or prescribe medical protocols. We will, however, recommend practices for bodily, mental, and spiritual well-being. We encourage you to discuss any insights you derive from your reading with your medical providers to see if they could impact your medical care.

We each direct our own healing and tell our own story. Your story may be anchored in whatever you believe is missing, wrong, or broken in your life. Or it may be elevated by your newfound courage, evolving understanding, and conscious choices. This is what excited us as we contemplated writing this book. As a mother and daughtereach on our own life path, each with our own storywe recognize in each other certain strengths that we believe can inspire readers. We also acknowledge that many of our stories stem from shared experiences. We strive to behold each other's wholeness, while allowing ourselves to be where we are in our own discoveries without interference.

We wrote this book to respect you and where you are in your own experience, as well as to support you as you learn to direct your own healing. Our hope is that it will help you reflect on the unique meaning of wholeness and healing in your life, and examine any current beliefs and perspectives that may be impacting your healing. Our goal is to help you select intentional actions that will help you heal and reclaim your wholeness.

We encourage you to use this book as a reference for the choices you make each day. We hope you will refer to it for encouragement and consult it as a source of relevant affirmations and recommended practices as they inspire you.

So here's to the whole you! Here's to who you thought you were. And here's to where you are right in this moment. It is time for you to claim your wholeness.

Through the oneness that lives inside of you, me, and all humans who walk the planet, we have a direct line to the same force that creates everything from atoms and stars to the DNA of life.

Gregg Braden, The Divine Matrix

Everyone knows someoneor is someonewho is working through an illness, a loss, or a challenging life circumstance. In times like these, wholeness and healing become prevalent themes. Wholeness is often understood as a destination, while healing is often seen as a method to get from an unwanted condition to a desired goal. The presumption is that wholeness is something to be achieved, while healing is something you do to achieve it. In this chapter, we offer empowering perspectives on wholeness and healing as a framework for self-discovery and self-mastery.

Wholeness is the original and absolute youthe you that, in any moment, can know itself and feel itself. The you that is, in any moment, an integration of all that has ever been. The you that is complete, in that nothing about you can be missing or unfinished in this moment. The you that is a complex system of relationships that cannot exist without one another. The you that is ever-evolving pure potential and infinite possibility.