My experience with migraines when I was younger provides an example of how taking ‘meaning’ from one’s illness can be transformational (Emotion Healed & Harnessed, pg.’s 85-87). After experiencing many migraines over the years, and with the benefit of hindsight, it finally dawned on me that they served a deeper purpose. Within a day or two after each migraine I would feel much calmer, with far less nervous tension in my body than I had prior to it. And this would continue for a week or so until my nervous tension and anxiety levels would gradually start to build again. I finally ‘got’ what my body was trying to tell me, and with that, reached a level of acceptance, and began to see my migraines as NOT just random events designed to cause me pain and discomfort. But, on the contrary, they had provided me with great insight and a way to ‘heal thyself’.
I became pro-active in learning natural methods of relaxation, meditation for example, and was prepared to make the required life-style changes and take the appropriate natural medicines. I was almost free of migraines within 6 months, and they became a thing of the past within 12 months. I am forever grateful for the insight and the way my life was transformed because of taking meaning from my migraines. I was able to “identify the implicit—the psyche’s message—in the explicit—the physical body’s symptoms” (Emotion Healed and Harnessed, pg. 47).
Emotions and Meaning
‘To cherish secrets and hold back emotion is a psychic misdemeanour for which nature finally visits us with sickness.’
Carl Jung, CW, para 132
Your body keeps a record of emotional events. The poet Maya Angelou is often quoted as saying, ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ Emotions, especially strong ones such as those associated with trauma, ‘live on’ in the body. In The Body Keeps the Score (2015), psychiatrist Dr Bessel van der Kolk describes how trauma impacts our physicality. Specifically, he shows that individuals who experience trauma are more likely to experience physical symptoms later in life, including diabetes, autoimmune disorders, and heart disease. If painful emotions are repressed instead of processed with some level of awareness, this often leads to negative physical outcomes.
In Alice Bailey’s book (1953), Esoteric Healing, she states “that in the subjective and hidden attitudes of the mind and of the emotional nature … must be sought the causes of all disease” (pg. 9). According to Bailey, most causes of disease are found to be from lack of vitality (quality of our vital force) and in the realm of our feelings, desires (repressed or over-indulged), moods, and deep-seated longings. If we allow our emotions to inform us, we will be able to read the meaning that exists for us in everyday experiences and events. An emotion is an instinctive reaction to life and so often the conscious expression of what is unconscious in us. If emotion is repressed, “nature finally visits us with sickness.”
This is why I encourage my clients to engage more fully with their dis-ease or illness—to fully experience it and endeavour to understand the ‘message in the body’. In my latest book, “Emotions Healed & Harnessed” (pg. 48), I give many examples of the message (s) (from your psyche) to consider if you are suffering from certain body ailments or diseases. Pharmaceutical drugs may play an important and humane role in temporarily ameliorating our uncomfortable physical symptoms and/or helping us to manage them, but in doing so they also prevent or at least modify the physical body’s full expression of disease that has its roots much deeper in our being. This can obscure our ability to gain valuable insight and perceive the root causes of our disease or illness. I obviously recommend and practice health approaches that not only can ameliorate and manage pain and discomfort but also aim to facilitate ‘the Healer within’ to resolve disease at its true cause.
As Carl Jung described it, the body and psyche are ‘two sides of the same coin.’ They are inseparable. In his essay ‘Spirit and Life,’ Carl Jung asserts that ‘mind and body are the expression of a single entity.’ And Dr. M.L. Dhawale in his book, Principles & Practice of Homeopathy (1985), states that “Emotions provide the greatest driving force to an individual. A proper understanding of these [emotions] is imperative for a physician” evaluating “the individual’s total response to his surroundings … [T]he emotional and physical spheres in an individual are closely inter-related and a disturbance in the one cannot but be reflected in the other.” (pg. 68-69)
Because illness is an external consequence of a person’s unique process occurring deep within their being, rather than a random, senseless event, we have a choice about how we respond to it. We can choose to reflect on our illness and perceive meaning. Over the years I have worked with thousands of clients - utilising flower essence, meditation and emotion focused therapies - to help them gain insight from their illnesses to enable them to become healthier and happier.
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