4 minute read
Pathways to Conscious Health
Pathways to Conscious Health Illness as Healer
Recently I had the flu. Yes, an ordinary ‘flu’, as I’ve had many times prior to 2020. I chose to avoid getting on the bandwagon of a wannabe label by having a grossly inaccurate test. I did not want to add to the hysteria. I self-isolated while I waited for my body to recover and that was enough.
Having said that, I do not actually believe that anyone ‘gives’ us an illness, or that we ‘catch’ it from someone else. I know that, personally, it is a certain type of emotional stress, part of my internal milieu, that makes me vulnerable to experiencing un-wellness. This time, exactly as before, I had ignored the emotional cues until my body kindly reminded me of what I needed to address. Hindsight is a wonderful thing!
We’ve got it so wrong regarding illness causation. Our medical world is fixated on physical cause and effect and hunting down the supposed enemy to annihilate it into oblivion. As if! I know it doesn’t actually work that way - it’s good for the sickness industry though.
The wisdom of my body decided to find a way to slow me down, to do some long overdue emotional processing and inner reflection that I had been way ‘too busy’ and distracted to give time to. As I surrendered to this wisdom to naturally heal, which it did quickly and completely, I addressed the inner turmoil that instigated the un-wellness. With that, and some much needed time away from the fray, the insights came.
During the process, I also knew that my immune system received a nice work-out and toxins, physical and, particularly, emotional, were being expelled from my system. Illness will flush to the surface what needs to be acknowledged and released, for that content is much better out of our system than remaining hidden, where it continues to exert its insidious deleterious effects by stealth. The body knows before the intellect, so we are well advised to tune in. Labels and diagnoses are intellectual constructs that are superfluous to the experience of unwellness. Our bodies gift us with being reliable reflections of what we hold in our vast unconscious minds. Essentially, all illness is an opportunity to address the ‘shadow’, those deeper, hidden aspects of our consciousness that are begging to be acknowledged and integrated.
Many would be confronted by these notions, as they go against what we have been programmed to believe about health, and many prefer to remain comforted by the belief that they can defend against, or attack, the perceived enemy without.
In current times, this defending against the dubious invisible enemy is officially encouraged, if not enforced, to an unprecedented degree. This is aided by a heavy dose of government sanctioned psychological ‘nudging’ that has manipulated people’s primal survival fears to have them unquestionably comply to this extremely myopic,
By Dr Catherine Fyans
unilateral approach to health care. When people are gripped by survival fears, to the extent that their more rational pre-frontal cortices are all but shut down on the matter, they will not be receptive to more expansive understandings of illness manifestation.
People argue that acknowledging consciousnessrelated factors regarding illness manifestation is a blame game. Over the years, I have often heard, “You are blaming me for my illness!?” as though they, themselves, have nothing to do with what goes on in their own bodies. It’s an interesting perspective. Exploration of these areas is not about blame at all; it is about awareness, insight, self-responsibility and, potentially, a much deeper knowing of oneself. However, when people are gripped by the victim stance, they will not be interested in self-responsibility.
We have collectively decided that all illness is erroneous, malign, harmful and an aberration of nature. I beg to differ. Nature does not get it wrong; we are just very good at misinterpreting it, especially when it comes to matters of health. Proponents of the problem-reaction-solution and
fix it models, upon which most of modern healthcare is based, would not embrace these concepts in any way.
llness and pain gain our attention when other indications do not, yet can also be a great distraction from the machinations of our minds. When we are focussed solely on the physical, as our medical culture encourages us to be, we get further away from the contents of our consciousness that contributes to the illness experience. It takes some re-training to alter our gaze.
We do need to support the body while we attend to the related mental and emotional factors within. There are always physical factors because we are in a physical world. However, we can take care of the details of our physical symptoms and needs, while maintaining a bigger picture perspective. We can tend to the micro while acknowledging the macro. Either, alone, will probably not cut it.
To quote Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung - “We are not so much meant to heal our illnesses but rather our illnesses are meant to heal us.”
Dr Catherine is a retired medical practitioner and author of The Wounding of Health Care.
Image Credit: Pixabay
