But Wait, There's More...

June 06, 2016 2 Comments

It’s a funny thing, but just when I’m feeling a sense of deep understanding of some aspect of my life, or I make some major aha! connection, the universe throws in another new situation and I am challenged to reexamine, reevaluate and rethink all over again. Maybe not exactly the same issue but maybe some new version of it, or maybe an entirely new challenge to sink my soul into. Life’s like that. Growth is like that. No matter how much we think we are in the driving seat, or how much we think we have control over our lives, the reality is that all we actually have control over is our response to the various scenarios we live and experience. This is the healing journey.

Life is a perpetual journey of self-discovery. 

It is more of a spiralling process where we recognize deeper and deeper levels of self-awareness… perhaps as we revisit the same issues over and over again. A journey of understandings and eventual realizations of our soul truth.

Healing, I think, is not the resolution of this or that ailment, but the realization of the role our actions, thoughts, feelings and emotions (all things we have control of) have to play in our day to day existence and, by extension, our day to day health.

This is not about blame or dismissal of the human pain and suffering that we all experience. Pain and suffering is part of the human condition and we are good at it. This is about personal responsibility and ownership of our unique individual journeys here on earth, in our bodies, in this lifetime, whatever conditions we face. This is about recognising the awesome intelligence of our physical bodies and how they communicate with us. This is about how the body can facilitate our growth as infinite spiritual beings in a finite, physical realm.

For me, my head has always been my indicator, my screaming siren of something not being right. I’ve lived a lifetime with chronic headaches starting in my early teens. For a long time they were fairly easy to ignore. Our culture offers a myriad of solutions for dulling the pain. Pain is bad. Just pop a couple pills and get on with it, right? Except that eventually my body had to ramp up the message in an effort to get my attention. The pain got worse. It was hard to dull. It was hard to ignore. My body, my head became a battlefield and I was a hapless victim.

Why was my “defective” body failing me? I joked that all I needed was a new head. I then went through many years of trying to assign blame to something for causing the pain. Was it the caffeine? Was it hormones? Or maybe my spine was out of alignment. Stress? Environmental toxins? Gluten? Whatever...my head was my enemy. And unfortunately it was winning.

So what was the turning point? (This is where I say I finally accepted responsibility and now everything is hunky dory.) Ummm, not exactly. Instead, the turning point was when I finally realised my body was not my enemy and was just my warning system that something was not working or that there was something I needed to attend to—not just physically, but also emotionally or spiritually, or all of the above. The message was there, loud and clear, it was just my job to interpret it.

And that is the work of a lifetime.

It is daily self-care, daily self-reflection, self-love, the learning, the compassion, the understanding, the growth, the whatever you want to call it. This is what self-heal is helping me understand. I am not a victim in my circumstances, whatever they may be. My health, my life, my experiences are all there to help me remember who I am in this journey and in this lifetime.

My body is a gift. A miracle. A friend.

And ultimately we may end this lifetime without necessarily finding a cure for what “ails” us, but the hope is we have done a whole lot of healing, and a whole lot of growing, on the way.

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