The Art of Inner Alchemy Series
#2 Seeing Symptoms as our Allies
The internet is a curious world. You can find anything and everything and oft times it is overwhelming. Do you ever find yourself no longer knowing quite what to believe in? You can have a thought on something, look it up with the Google Gods and no doubt find something on it. Whether there is any veracity to what is online is highly debatable, but it’s certainly curious. And of late, there seems to be more and more talk, both online and offline, on health and healing. And the further down the road of life I go, the more I realise how upside down many of my understandings about life have been, especially as regards health.
Like most of us, I was brought up to consider any physical ailment and its symptoms as purely a bad thing, that something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. And so, at every sniffle, fever or muscular pain, I would seek to remedy the problem. Of course, who wouldn’t?
What are you on about Sonia?
Stay with me. Let’s explore this one a little further. I can guarantee that regardless of what beliefs you may have on illness and its cures, we may all find a common point in what I’d like to express in this article.
Let’s go back to the idea of these symptoms as being the bad guys. Oh no, you’ve got a cold. Who did you get it from? And everyone must stay away lest they catch it too! That’s the common reaction, right? And it would seem logical. But what if those symptoms weren’t so much enemies but rather allies, fighting in our corner with us instead of against us?
She’s lost the plot this time.
Recently, I’ve been studying up on various holistic treatment models. I have come across so many, too many to name here, but to give an example of some:
Louise Hay and the emotional and mental causes of illness
Joe Dispenza and the power of our mind: we are the placebo
Irene Lyon and how to become our own medicine by healing a disregulated nervous system
Dr. David Berceli and TRE - Trauma Release Exercises, literally shaking it off naturally
EFT tapping for anxiety relief
EMDR trauma therapy, literally rewiring your brain to make traumatic events mere memories
Qi-Gong and working with the life force energy of our biofield
Eileen McKusick and Biofield Tuning, a specific sound healing technique for healing
Barbaba O’Neill and a close look at nature and nutrition, and how to unlock the body’s natural healing potential
Homeopathy, acupuncture and osteopathy, all three now quite established and accepted even with the mainstream
Past-Life regression to heal what happened beyond this current lifetime, if that is a part of your belief system
Somatic healing modalities, releasing the wound straight from the body, bypassing the mind entirely
German New Medicine (GNM).
This latter modality is a very recent discovery for me, and honestly, I don’t yet know what to make of it. I do have to say it’s aligning nicely with some of the complementary healing modalities I’ve benefitted a lot from in my life, especially this year. The premise of GNM is that a physical manifestation of an ailment has as its root cause psycho-emotional and spiritual origins.
But Sonia, we know that many ailments are psychosomatic, just take gastritis, reflux, IBS, any digestive issue is largely due to stress.
Yes, I know, but this takes it further and it’s the view on symptoms that I am finding particularly interesting and strangely enough, this new lens I am getting used to looking through is showing me something deeper in this awareness.
Ok, go on then.
I have dealt with digestive issues over the years, especially in my late twenties, when I had a particular bout of what I was told was “chronic gastritis” and “reflux”. I had no idea what these terms meant and at 26 had other things on my mind, but my body was screaming at me to stop. So for a year, I struggled with my health, darting around the city tying to find a doctor who could help me. I was prescribed pill after pill, which I obligingly gulped down, but they did nothing. Literally nothing. If anything, some even made my symptoms worse. So, I’d go back to the doctors with this news, they’d look at me with dull eyes and not have many other options other than to up the dose. I obeyed and ended up feeling the side effects of the drug but none of the benefits. It just wasn’t working with me.
For months and months I led a gastro-monastic lifestyle, having eliminated anything of interest from my diet, boiling what remained and making sure it was as bland as possible. Gone was alcohol, chocolate (!), mint (what did those little green leaves ever do to anyone?), dairy products, tomatoes, the list continued. I slept with the head of my bed raised. I popped my pills. I did test after test, to examine the mechanics and pH of my digestive tract. I endured a horrific endoscopy to find out what was happening on the inside. And still, my symptoms persisted. I just wanted them to stop! I wanted to stop feeling my oesophagus. I wanted to quell the daily bloating and just get on with my life!
But my gastric juices had something else in mind. And they were screaming at me to pay attention. And so I did. I slowed down. I took out some of the extra books I’d been carrying around in the rucksack of life and started doing something I’d never allowed myself the time to do ever in my young life at that point.
I listened to my body.
I went back to the consultant for a check-up. I wanted to let him know that the treatments weren’t working. Sat behind his desk part buried in piles of paper, never making eye-contact with me, he hurriedly wrote my life sentence on his doctor’s pad.
Medication for the foreseeable future
Ad infinitum list of banned food and drink
Gastroscopy every two and a half years for the rest of my life
I swear this is what he told me. Even writing it down nearly twenty years later, it feels like some kind of sick joke. And this was one of the head gastroenterologists in the city.
It was the last item on his list that pushed me over the edge.
“Ma ho solo 26 anni. Non voglio dover farne così tanti!”
I was only 26 and didn’t want to do any more endoscopies.
I was still reeling from the recent horrific experience of having an oversized exploratory tube shoved down my throat despite my mute squeals and squirms.
The consultant stopped writing, put down his pen, lowered his glasses halfway down his nose and finally looked at me.
“Signorina. Lei deve smettere di pensare di essere malata”
I have to stop thinking I’m sick? Is this really what he was telling me? I then asked him something quite logical, but that went against everything he had been telling me to do.
“Posso smettere di prendere tutte quelle pillole allora?”
Can I stop popping all those pills? Cos it’s those that are making me feel like I’m sick.
He paused, thought about this for a moment and nodded.
That evening, I went home, I gathered all the pill boxes, put them into a large bag and disposed of them. That action, so cathartic at the time had a ripple effect into the future. It was the first time I took my health into my own hands. I didn’t magically recover over night, but I accepted I was in discomfort and that my body needed some TLC. I relaxed over what I could or couldn’t eat and I realised I actually wanted simple food. It was fine. It wasn’t ideal or much fun, but it was nourishing and what my body needed. I accepted the bloating, as uncomfortable and embarrassing as it was at times. And six months later one day I realised I didn’t have any of the physical pain in my chest and throat anymore. It had gone. And I hadn’t even realised.
But what had also happened in those six months is I had changed my life. I quit my job. I started a new career in cyclotourism, one I fell in love with, which allowed me to travel, meet and work with people, and learn so much about our incredible planet. And my heart healed.
Years later, with more life experience and knowledge of how healing works, I realised what had been the underlying cause of this ailment.
Just weeks before I had had my first symptoms of gastritis, an important relationship of four years had come to an end. It was amicable and mutual, done consciously and with love, right to last moment. Not many relationships end in that way and I consider myself lucky to have had such a beautiful partner with whom I could experience conscious uncoupling before I knew that was even a word for it. But I never grieved the end of that relationship and I certainly didn’t acknowledge something deeper still.
It had been my decision to end that relationship and part of the reason was I’d never been alone as an adult. From the age of 17 I’d been in relationships constantly, almost as if I were running away from myself. But the call to be alone and to find out who I was rang loudly and I listened.
They say gut issues is linked with the inability to let go of the past, that it is here that our courage resides and where fear, inaction, and indecision can take hold. I had been stuck for years, not knowing which route to take or which direction to go in. I didn’t realise this at the time, but by listening to my body I learned to connect with my deeper self. I learned to soften and as I did so, my buried emotions emerged. From deep within. Wounds from childhood, from my past, buried, unseen, forgotten. But in the words of Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score and is our closest ally. Sometimes, that ally needs to give us strong signals that not all is well.
German New medicine, and many of the modalities mentioned in the list above, hold the belief that illness, dis-ease, is the body detoxing, literally shedding emotions. Lungs for example represent grief, so allowing the body to expel any phlegm has a cathartic emotional release. Anger is stored in the liver. Not been able to express yourself fully? Your throat may have something to say about that even if you haven’t been able to find your voice. And it will help you to, by drawing attention to what needs healing, what has been neglected and where the wounds are held.
If we do a water fast, we might notice our skin has an outbreak of spots, a drawing up of the toxins and negativity held within, coming to the surface to be discarded of. Apparently dark room retreats are among the most powerful as you have no choice but to look within, so a lot of shedding can happen afterwards.
One of the lessons I learned is that trauma can become trapped in the body and when it finally emerges, it can hurt like hell. But ultimately, I learned not to fear my body and I gained a new-found love and admiration for the inimitable intelligence of nature. This year I found myself reflecting back to that 26-year old I had been and realising that those symptoms were a blessing not a curse.
It was my body guiding me to safer shores, to happier shores.
It was my body releasing tensions of the past to allow for softness and love to enter.
It was my body healing.
I started to write about the health journey I have been on this past year in my last article, the first in this series on Inner Alchemy. And it has taught me so much about healing. We have the urge to resist pain and discomfort, but perhaps it is more a case of accepting it and learning how to get so close to it and not fear it.
Healing happens when we see.
And when we see, we can transmute pain into joy, fear into love and blockages into freedom.
This is the Alchemy of Healing.
