In “A Turtle, a Dinosaur, and Us” I follow an unexpected connection from a wildlife rescue hospital to a familiar pressure: the feeling that we have to make life work.

A Turtle, a Dinosaur, and Us

A recent online report described evidence of a healed injury in the fossilized tissue of the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex, commonly known as T. rex.

While watching a nature series on television about a wild animal rescue hospital, I saw a rescued turtle whose shell had been severely damaged and the hospital staff providing the aid that supported the turtle’s natural healing process.

There are millions of people on the planet as you read this – you may even be one of them - healing from barely noticeable injuries to catastrophic ones.

Life’s Capacity to Heal

The healing phenomenon of a T. Rex 66 million years ago, the healing of a turtle shell, the healing of a leg in a cast from a skiing accident – these all represent a very telling reality about Life itself.

That life is continuously expressing itself as a complete, functioning expression. When an injury interrupts that expression, what we call healing is actually a witnessing of life’s ongoing completeness in action.

Contrary to conventional assumption no aid, practitioner, or device (synthetic, organic or mechanical) “heals” – at best, these efforts support or create conducive conditions for life’s innate completeness to optimally function.

The point of highlighting these considerations is to recognize and realize that, although we labor under the universal brainwashing that we must make life work, the reality hiding in plain sight is that life works supremely and continuously of its own accord.

Taken together, these examples and the countless other phenomena they represent illustrate that life is continuously expressing its completeness. It is our superimposed, false assumption that we must make life work that constricts or interferes with that innate integrity of being.

This principle of life’s completeness and fundamental capacity applies to everything—not just physical healing—because everything exists within the life we are describing.

Are relationships outside of life? Is money outside of life?

Are our intended purposes outside of life? These questions are, of course, rhetorical.

Nothing is outside of life, so all its facets would reflect this same integrity of completeness.

How, then, do we realize this integrity of completeness in the areas where we struggle?

How do we witness harmony and completeness in relationships that falter—or when the relationships we desire are absent? How do we witness this completeness in our finances and the flow of abundance?

How do we experience it as success in our professions, goals, aims, and careers? And how do we witness it as health and vitality—the same ongoing completeness that injuries give us an opportunity to observe through what we recognize as healing?

Life Works and the Nervous System

Well, through this article, you’ve already taken the first step in recognizing that life functions optimally by its own nature. This recognition dispels the notion that “we” are responsible for making life work—a belief that can lead us to act out of fear rather than understanding, interfering with the natural expression of life’s innate completeness.

The next step brings this understanding to the nervous system and what I’ve described in recent articles as the somatic response in living. In my previous article, Why Healing Stalls, I introduced this approach through the body’s learned responses to safety, effort, threat, and permission.

In this framework, the nervous system serves as the means through which what is permitted to express in our lives is regulated.

In this step, you gently remind yourself at moments throughout your week that “life works,” inviting your nervous system to organize somatically around that understanding. This supports your mental, emotional, and etheric accommodation and alignment with this perspective.

(Etheric refers to the subtle energy aspect of a person, understood in some traditions as supporting physical vitality.)

To be clear, the gentle reminder that “life works” is not a command to a genie to make something desirable happen. It brings your awareness back to the fundamental capacity of life’s nature to function optimally and sufficiently, helping to reduce the tendency to act from fear or ignorance.

Practically speaking, you still initiate or participate in actions and activities in the areas of life that matter to you. However, those actions are informed—and perhaps adjusted—by your somatic alignment with the understanding that life works.

Dating and relationship possibilities unfold from a more optimal vantage point. Business efforts and endeavors become opportunities for growth, greater efficiency, and optimization.

Health considerations and actions emerge from a more viable, actionable mindset that frees you from limiting ideas and assumptions about health.

The final step may seem a bit counterintuitive on the surface, but its purpose is very sound: to receive, witness, and experience in stride the beneficial alignments reflecting life’s innate working order.

As you witness welcomed breakthroughs—which you will if you remain resolute in accommodating the thesis presented here—refrain from assigning a sense of special accomplishment or exceptional benefit to the more optimized conditions of your experiences.

To perceive improved conditions as ‘special’ communicates somatically to the nervous system that they are not normal. Life working, as in the healing witnessed during injury recovery, is normal.

Your nervous system will not regulate optimal experiences as normal if they are regarded as special dispensations. Regarding them as normal does not mean taking them for granted.

Reconsidering the Need to Make Life Work

Ultimately, you are no longer looking for ways to make your life work. You are releasing the conditioning that interferes with its innate capacity to function.

Still think the profile of a healing turtle is just an interesting feature on a nature show? Think again.

And perhaps that is the point: to reevaluate our thinking.

If you’d like to explore the conditioning behind the pressure to make life work, I invite you to book a personalized hypnotherapy session with me.