BELIEVE!

Did you know that even the eye color of a schizophrenic person can change based on which personality they Believe themselves to be at the time? A Yale professor has studied the neurological responses of the body in people who are schizophrenic or have multiple personality disorders. He found that people with the disease Believe so strongly that they are that personality at that time, that eye color, facial markings, illnesses like diabetes, come and go as the patients fade in and out of each personality.

The power of Belief is that strong! A new friend of mine, who walked with me the third day of the breast cancer walk even though he didn't have to, started the walk with me by asking, "What's your goal today?" This guy, for all intensive purposes, had never met me before! We met maybe twice before that day. I responded as I generally did, taking it easy on myself, saying "well I just want to finish today BUT if I have to ride a few times (they had vans that would pick up people who needed a break and take them to the next pit stop) I won't be too hard on myself." Well isn't that a load of crap! At the time I didn't realize that I was giving myself an out! I didn't Believe I could finish. A couple hours later we were approaching a pit stop - we couldn't see it yet but knew we were getting close. My new friend looks me in the eye and says, "you know we're really close right?" And I said, "yeah I know." At that moment he looked at me again and said, "I know you know it but I don't feel as though you Believe it."

WOW! How did he know that? Just the night before, I said to my tent-mate that I had had my AHA moment earlier that day - you know the you gotta look in the mirror and make that change moment - but I didn't Believe it yet. This little word was popping up everywhere. And the reason I didn't Believe it was because I had tried so many times before and failed. I now realize I had failed before because I didn't BELIEVE I could do it.

So what changed? I'm actually sitting here as I type trying to think what changed??? You know it used to be I wanted to lose weight because I wanted to wear the hottest fashions. Sometimes it was because I wanted to please my Dad or my grandmother, both of whom never kept their disapproval about my weight as a child a secret. Sometimes it was because of this guy or that guy. Sometimes it was as simple as I want to be like everyone else (most of my friends now and back in the day are/were skinny). There were also the crusade years when I was like I'm going to beat this and I'm going to do it for myself blah blah blah. But now, I physically can't carry this weight anymore. All of the other reasons are still there I'm not going to lie. But accomplishing the walk made me BELIEVE in myself... BELIEVE that YES I CAN!

So back to my friend at the walk.... he had to work that afternoon so had to leave shortly after lunch. We had walked more than 1/2 of the miles we were to walk for the day and I was alive. I was feeling pain but I was alive! He looked me in the eye again and he said, "what are your goals for the day now?" I guess he knew that my entire frame of mind changed in the course of the day because my answer was completely different. I was going to finish whether I was going to be the last walker over the finish line or not. And I did! Now I had a little help from another teammate on the last leg! In fact, she said I'm walking with you and if you're walking I'm walking. We actually dipped into a local bar off Dupont Circle, slapped back a lemon drop shot and walked on!

So my friends the moral of the story is this: Believe in that which you can not see and eventually you'll see what you've been Believing in!