A Healthy Approach to Being Sick
In the last 6 months we have gone from being a family that hardly
dipped into its medical aid, to one that seems to have hung out a big
neon welcome sign for every germ, bug, virus and infection passing
through the area. You name it, we’ve had it, and probably twice. Of
course that has got me thinking about the nature of illness and its
meaning(s). Like many of you, I have in recent years stopped thinking
that sickness happens ‘to’ us, preferring to understand that our
‘biology is our biography’ (Caroline Myss) and that illness is a vivid
way of communicating messages to us from our higher, or essential,
selves. That viewpoint allows us to feel responsible as well as
empowered, responsibility’s happy byproduct. So far so good.
What seems to have insidiously crept into that philosophy, however,
(perhaps a hangover from our Calvinist roots) is that the body’s message
is always punitive, or at the very least corrective. In other words,
sickness means that we have been doing something wrong. Clients usually
ask the question ‘what have I not been seeing’, or ‘where am I going
wrong’ when they have readings about being sick or sore. They presume
that when something goes ‘wrong’ with the body it is an indication that
they have also been doing something ‘wrong’, or maybe just not quite
right. I even had a teacher that described any kind of physical illness,
injury or accident as being ‘smashed by the universe’. If we believe
that sickness necessarily shows some kind of displeasure, or correction,
from the soul then we are still attached to a deep-rooted consciousness
of punishment, even if it is couched in more aware, New Agey kind of
language.
Many of us are choosing to live from the belief that love is the source,
centre and destination of everything (John O Donohue), and we are
dissolving the concepts of right and wrong into more nuanced and
compassionate ways of seeing the world. But when it comes to sickness
(and in fact the realm of the body altogether) we are still thinking
like the proverbial caveman who interpreted thunder as the anger of God.
If every time you get a sore throat your first thought is ‘what am I not
saying’, or ‘where am I being untruthful’, then you are part of a whole
bunch of us that has been clinging to a response to sickness that is
outdated and fear-based but, more importantly, that is no longer
working.
I’m all for effectiveness, so if it worked to ask these kinds of
questions, I’d be supporting them wholeheartedly.
‘Mmm, my throat is kinda sore today, that must mean I’m not telling my
truth. Dear Universe/God/Angels, what have I not being saying?’
‘Aha, you felt that did you? We thought you might he he. Now go and tell
your mother in law you actually don’t want to spend Christmas day
watching slides of your husband’s previous girlfriend, the one with the
long legs and the PhD who is doing ambassador work for the UN.’
‘Oh, um, yes. Ok. Sorry about that, I promise I won’t do it again’
[Ping Ping! Sore throat magically disappears.].
Ok, ok, I’m being a tad facetious but that is merely the exaggerated
version of how many of us have been approaching our bodies and our
sickness - if we can just figure out (or consult a channel to tell us)
what the illness is trying to say, and correct it, we can get better and
do away with the irritation or pain or debilitation of disease. Of
course that doesn’t work, at least not fully.
And why doesn’t it work? Because of this very simple equation given
recently in someone’s reading:
• If you call something ‘wrong’, you cannot also be grateful for it.
[Try that out!]
• Until you are grateful for something, you cannot receive the fullness
of its gift.
• Therefore, while you are still calling something wrong, you can’t
experience the fullness of the gift that it brings
Capish? So if we are saying that sickness is wrong, or is the universe’s
way of telling us something is wrong, then we will not be able to
receive the gift of that sickness, which means it will probably hang
around, recur or revisit us in some other way. Not in order to punish
us, but only to move us closer to our real joy. Like everything else in
existence, that is also the purpose of sickness.
In the next Bull’s Eye, I will share some different ways to think about
being sick, and give some practical suggestions for working with our
bodies’ messages.
November 2007
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