Health, Illness And Our Bodies As Self-Expression

“My body is more than a vehicle which carries me through life. My body is a storehouse for my memories, a sensitive radar kit which warns me of danger, a wise teacher who signals me how best to care for my spirit. When I listen to my body, I am led into right and wise actions. When I take seriously the guidance it offers, I make decisions that honor me in a holistic way.”
~ Julia Cameron, Blessings

Unfortunately, we don’t always heed our body’s guidance. And when we don’t, isn’t that when the trouble starts?

How often do we respect our bodies’ messages? A stiff neck when we are typing? A sore back when raking leaves? A headache when we visit a difficult family member? It’s as if our bodies are saying, Stop, go easy, something’s not right, this isn’t good for us.

Our bodies’ most basic messages are learned instantly: Don’t touch a hot stove; don’t jump off any tall buildings. Other messages take longer to hear: You can’t go from couch potato to kick boxer in one day.

If we start having trouble climbing the stairs two at a time, it’s our body saying, Hey you! You need more exercise. If we feel really bad when we eat or drink a certain thing, it’s a message to not eat or drink that. If we’re exhausted every morning, maybe we need to go to bed earlier.

On a more energetic level, our bodies express what we feel about ourselves. Our beliefs about ourselves and life in general are often reflected in our bodies. Yet we often ignore this truth and blame our bodies for getting in our way, not cooperating with us, and limiting our activities.

But what about Cameron’s idea, quoted above, that our bodies are a guidance system, a messenger, a teacher? It’s not always easy to hear what is the lesson.

When we have ignored the self’s messages for a long time, illness develops. In the world that we live in, we are not encouraged to listen to our inner guidance and follow where it leads. We are trained to do the opposite, to make a rational decision about our lives, weigh the pros and cons in a reasonable way, and then proceed on a course of action no matter what. Ignoring the body, we turn to the mind.

Do this long enough and illness develops. Maybe it’s just lots of colds. Maybe it’s a chronic headache or infection. Maybe it’s something more dramatic, like a broken leg, or something serious, like a heart attack. Whatever it is, it is a message from ourselves, and it always tells us something quite specific about our process.

Hearts Under Attack

Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, Congo and other bestsellers, started out in medical school, planning to be a doctor. In the late 1960’s while interning in Boston, he became curious about how heart attack patients viewed their illnesses.

He was stunned by their answers:

“I got a promotion. My company wants me to move to Cincinnati. My wife doesn’t want to go…That’s why.”

“My wife is talking about leaving me.”

“My son won’t go to law school.”

“I didn’t get the raise.”

“I want to get a divorce and feel guilty.”

“My wife wants another baby and I don’t think we can afford it.”

(You can read more about this in his book of personal essays, Travels.)

Somehow these men knew what their bodies were expressing for them, and they were able to interpret the experience of having a heart attack through their emotions—their hearts felt “attacked” on the emotional level and this was expressed on the physical plane. Not one mentioned diet, stress, heredity, smoking or any other commonly thought of “causes” of heart attacks.

How astonishing that our bodies can express things so literally! And really how wonderful, it makes the body seem so…human. So accessible. So intimately a part of our wholeness.

There are several things that an illness or injury can be doing for us.

Illness As A Red Flag

"Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place."
~ Eckhart Tolle, in The Power Of Now

First and foremost, illness is an urgent messenger, attempting to draw our attention to some aspect of our life gone awry. The example from Michael Crichton fits in here. Sometimes we just can’t bring ourselves to face a conflict, be it internal or external, and so our body does it for us. It says, in effect, Yes you will look at this thing, one way or another.

Twenty years ago I made a very bad decision. It was a classic “lesser of two evils” scenario, so I made the one that I thought might cause me the least amount of grief in the long run. I immediately began to suffer the consequences.

I managed for two or three years to stick to my decision. But by not dealing with the emotional aspects of this decision, and admitting that I’d made an error and needed to change the situation, I forced the energy involved here to go deeper and work on me in other ways. It finally manifested as a chronic illness.

Before I saw what was happening and acknowledged the validity of my body’s message, I went to many, many health practitioners and spent huge sums of money trying to correct what seemed to be a physical problem. No matter what I did, the most I could get was short term limited results. This is because I wasn’t addressing the core of the problem, which was forcing myself to live by a decision that was a mistake from the start.

The problem was that I didn’t allow my feelings to come out in a way that they could be dealt with. I didn’t ever say, in a heartfelt way, Look, I made a mistake here. This is seriously not working for me. What can we do?

Just this much would have been honoring my body’s message and would have given an opening for change. There are chances all along the way for a condition of illness to be altered. As we learn to hear our body’s messages, we get better at living our lives in accordance, not with our body’s limitations, but with our whole self’s purposes and desires.

Suppressed emotions turn into symptoms. Louise Hay, in her book You Can Heal Your Life, goes into great detail about exactly which emotions relate to which specific symptoms. This is one of many great resources available for looking at your process with illness and trying to interpret its message. Emotions are our first guidance system, meant to tell us whether the path we are on is the right one. If we ignore them, then stronger signals are needed, and so we create symptoms. If we ignore those, illness develops.

Illness As A Catalyst For Growth

If you have an illness, can you see what you are learning during the course of it? Patience, trust, gratitude, and courage are just some of the things that can be learned through an illness.

If we can focus on what the message is, and do our best to learn the lessons, illness can be much easier to overcome. All along the way, we can ask, what is this teaching me? Notice what actions, feelings, or trains of thought make your situation better. If the lesson is patience, embrace patience. Actively pursue it, embody it.

There are many ways to learn a lesson, and resistance to it can be the hardest one.

The course of my chronic illness taught me many lessons. I learned to really look at my experience and understand what things were violations, large or small, of my own well-being. I learned flexibility. I learned how to say no; and oddly enough, how to say yes, too.

Caroline Myss has many books and audio programs that help us look at illness from the point of view of its lessons. Quite often in her examples she shows that illness can be an expression of identification with a group or a part of ourselves, that is attached to relationship with other people in a way that is unhelpful. Examples of this are people who insist that their condition is hereditary; people who identify so strongly with a group who shares their condition, such that there is no identity beyond the disease; and situations where the nature of a relationship is dependent on one person’s illness.

Does heart disease “run in” your family? Do you then feel it is inevitable that you have this condition? Is there a sense of belonging to this? These are hard questions. If all the generations of my family have a particular disease, and I don’t, does that mean I’m not really part of the group?

There is a sense of connection that is created in us very early on, in which our identities are formed by these kinds of definitions. Although on one level we’re sure we want to avoid the heart attack, the cancer, the diabetes. On another level it is threatening to strike out on our own like that—what will it mean about our role in the family and our own inner security, to be different from everyone else?

One way to look at this is to ask yourself what you’d lose if you were suddenly healed. There might be more of an answer than you’d think, and if you face that answer, you will find where you need to grow.

Creating Health Is In A Category Of Its Own

In a conversation last night, the subject of creating health came up, as it related to other things that a person might try to create. I realized that health is in a category of its own in a certain way. It’s obviously more personal than wanting a new car, a new job or even a new relationship. It’s harder to separate ourselves from it and step aside so that we can feel a different way about it.

But it is also always with us. We can’t get away from it, to get a different perspective. If I want to create wealth, I can close my eyes and visualize all kinds of wonderful realities, vacations, diamonds, private jets—I can enjoy that rich reality in all its fullness, to generate the energy to create it.

The same with relationships. I can close my eyes on my single bed, single toothbrush—hey, I can even buy another toothbrush, or a bigger bed, to “get ready”.

I can go someplace else if I don’t like where I live; I can use a credit card if I want the feeling of affluence; I can go out with friends to mitigate loneliness. I can test drive a new car, rent a new condo for a week, borrow library books, CDs or paintings, be treated to dinner by family or friends—all kinds of things can happen in other areas of life to help me get the feel of what I want, before I have it.

But not with health. If I am in pain or discomfort, it is with me when I close my eyes, when I rent a car, when I go on vacation, when I have dinner with friends; I can’t use “credit” to help get the feel of it. I can’t escape it in any kind of temporary way, to give myself the feeling of creating health.

So what to do then?

If illness comes as a result of not heeding the messages, then we can start to heed them. What does my body need now? What does my life need now?

Look for the messages that tell you what’s going on: This makes me sick. I’m sick of this job/person/situation. I am sick and tired of having to do this all the time. All these comments are thought of as just figures of speech, but they also have meaning. Look to see where you say this and what the message might be.

If you can’t imagine yourself well in the present moment, in order to do a visualization, remember when you were well in the past. Picture times when you felt wonderful. Don’t attach a timeframe to these. Just isolate those visions of yourself as a healthy person. Picture those times in your mind as clearly as you can. Know that the urge, the desire, the seed of health is within you. See it there in those memories and mental images.

There are many wonderful and effective energy healing techniques available to help you shift on an energetic level. BodyTalk and energy healing are just two that have proven helpful to thousands of patients.

What You Gain Is Not What You Might Think

What are you getting out of being sick? This question may be offensive to some. But it must be asked, for there is always something.

What can you do, or can you avoid doing, as a result of your illness? The answer to this question could go a long way towards explaining why you have it. Another way to go at this, a different question to ask is: What would change if I became well? If I can look at that answer and then direct my attention towards dealing with that thing, then I’ve gone a long way towards answering the question of where my illness came from.

I’m not implying some kind of indulgent state where I think that you get waited on or coddled because of being sick. I know enough to know that that usually isn’t the case. But there is always something that is being gained or avoided when illness works on us in these ways.

Most often that thing we gain is ours by right, but we think we can’t or don’t deserve to have it unless we are sick. And very often that thing we avoid is something we have no business doing anyway, we just think we “ought” to or that we owe it to somebody or to the world.

So don’t use these words to make yourself feel even worse, or to beat yourself up. Use these words to release yourself from sickness. The message is, if there’s something that you don’t want to do, and you don’t want to do it so much that you’ve made yourself sick to avoid it—then don’t do it.

It’s okay to say no. It really is.

Sacred Contracts

In addition to the beliefs and processes that go into the creation of our health, I believe that there is another category of input that can affect us just as profoundly. Caroline Myss calls this idea Sacred Contracts. This idea suggests that we come into this life partially with a predetermined agenda, deciding ahead of time that there are certain things we need to learn while in this physical form. (This does not negate the idea of free will and conscious creation – it merely augments the reasons why things happen in our lives.)

This can sometimes involve illness, disability or some other aspect of our physical lives. We make a decision on a soul level to take on a challenge, in order to further our spiritual development in a particular way.

This does not at all mean that we are “doomed” to be sick or to die young, but it does bring to the table the idea that certain situations are not to be explained so easily.

This presents us with a particular focus for our life, perhaps a challenge to be met or an aspect of character to be developed. There are people who thrive despite major handicaps; and people who sink under the weight of even the slightest ones. It is not the situation itself that dictates how we live, but what we do with it. The lesson can be learned either way—through prolonged suffering under the limitation, or through transcending or healing it—the difference is in how our lives feel in the process. We always have the creative power to make things better, to attract or create just what we need to improve our lives and our situation.

If “cure” is beyond us, that doesn’t mean our lives have failed. It means that the lesson we are learning doesn’t fit the “standard model”; it’s a gross oversimplification and an unfair expectation to say that a successful life must involve a certain degree of health, and last a certain length of time. Our lives are our own private universes and whatever they are is perfect. As the inhabitant of that universe we are powerful experiencers and creators, and we have no obligation or need to compare ourselves with anyone else.

Our obligation is just the opposite: To focus on our own life and maximize our spiritual Self, magnify our talents and gifts, give the universe all that we have in us, and express our true nature. If we do that, we are healthy, despite missing limbs, dysfunctional systems, injured organs or other details of anatomy.

Health Is A Life In Motion

There is always movement in our energy field, and that movement will be expressed in our physical reality. No matter the situation, there is always somewhere to go with it. If we don’t attach labels like healing or cure to it, and just think of it as movement, it’s easier to approach this idea of conscious creation as it relates to illness.

Trusting the process, and being willing to work from the energetic level as well as the physical one, allows us to feel the power that we have to create the life we desire.

We can change and improve our lives. No matter what our situation, there is always change. This may lead to a healed body or it may not; but it will always lead to a healed life.

By Margie Waters