But I went to medical school and found my way through my own illness to a new way of understanding the wonder of the human body. I learned from the inside out how we are connected to everything around us—the food we eat, our environment, how we grow and raise our food, the way we move, the rhythm and love in our lives.

In my struggle with chronic fatigue, I found a way out through the science of Functional Medicine and have been blessed with the ability to share it and experience profound blessings as a result. I have been honored to be part of transforming many lives and writing seven New York Times bestsellers designed to create more healing and love in the world. I dreamed that change into being. I knew I had a mission, a calling to share this radical new medical paradigm and I believed it and saw it through fearlessly.

But there are other dreams that have not worked out so well for me. I have two beautiful children and the blessing of extraordinary friends and community. But in the area of love I had beliefs and behaviors that kept me from having the love that I wanted.

After two marriages and a recent relationship that didn’t work out, I recognized that maybe it was “me,” how I choose, how I was, my behavior, what I thought and believed about love, that kept me from having the love that I wanted. The truth was that I just didn’t believe in love—and that is why I never manifested it in my life. I realized that my experience as a kid set me up not to trust or believe that true love was possible.

All I saw was broken or half-lived relationships.

My parents divorced when I was five and my mother remarried a man she didn’t really love and had a horrible 40-year marriage. And my sister, who died last year, was married and divorced three times. Something screwy set us up for picking the wrong people.

My last relationship was better, deeper, more honest, but still not quite a fit and what I learned was that I didn’t believe in true love and didn’t even dream that it was possible, that I was perfectly capable of settling for half love or worse.

I now deeply know that it was my own thinking, my own refusal to dream the love I wanted into being, to even ask for it, that has kept me from it. And now, shifting that thinking, redirecting my internal compass I know that I can create what I want, I know I can find and experience the love that I dream.

But I didn’t get to this understanding by myself. It took work! I got help from Lauren Zander, a master coach, who started the Handel Group—one of the world’s leading coaching companies that forced me, however lovingly to see the truth about myself, who demanded that I own my dream and create it.

I have been great at creating my dream in many, many areas, but not in this one.

In fact, there is a science to manifesting your dreams in every area of your life, a methodology that took me through a deep process of resetting, rewiring my thinking and emotions.

We all have dreams—dreams for love, for career, for our bodies, for our finances, for our health, for “fill in the blank.” But often our beliefs, theories and thinking get in our way of having full on happiness and living into our dreams.

Getting help from a coach has been one of the best things I have ever done for myself.

Think of it as therapy with teeth!

Learn how to be the author of your own life, to design and manifest your dreams.

This is not a dress rehearsal for life!

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: elephant archives