Day 250 - Healing From the Inside Out and the Outside In

Day 250 - Healing From the Inside Out and the Outside In

I sat with a woman this morning who told me she had recently lost over fifty pounds. It was clear to me that she was very proud of her accomplishment, as well she should be. What interests me is that she didn't talk about her weight loss as a body thing - it was more about her motivation, her decision to make better choices and her determination. Another person I spoke with is recovering from surgery and is wanting to gain back a full range of motion and function. Yet another is a gentleman too young to be recovering from a stroke, and here I am dealing with my stuff. As I think back on my conversation with each of those individuals, I began to think about the depth of challenge we all faced. We each had lots of feelings about what we were contending with, and each of us had to dig deep and find extra strength and focus to work our way through our difficulty.  Through our sharing it became clear that the symptoms expressing in our bodies were triggering emotional and spiritual challenges as well They are connected.

 

I do believe that our bodies express that we hold inside. What needs to be healed on the inside gets expressed outwardly in our bodies. I'm not sure that there is a one-to-one correlation that equates a specific emotion to a specific illnesses or condition. What I have found is that there is a dialogue I can have within my self to uncover the aspects of my higher self that need nurturing, healing or transformation. Why do my neck and shoulders hurt some days and my feet on other days? Maybe my head is filled with too many troubling thoughts and it just gets "too heavy" so my poor neck has trouble holding it up. Why does stress relief relieve my neck pain? Why do we say a difficult situation or person is a pain in the neck? Emotions cause body pain? Maybe my neck and shoulders hurt when I am shouldering" too much responsibility. My spiritual lesson is to learn how to let some things go and get them off my shoulders instead of letting them weigh me down and hurt me.  Maybe my feet hurt when I "can't stand" something that is going on in my life. When my feet hurt I can't stand.

 

My first line of strategy in dealing with my fibro symptoms has been with with meds and treatments, but this journey of healing has been as much an inside job as it has been a medical recovery. I have spent lots of time contemplating the meaning of my journey, knowing that I can never know for sure why fibro chose me. What were the conditions in my life that made me ripe pickings for a nasty disorder that turned my life upside down? Maybe I needed to slow down, become less self-critical, change my work focus, pull back from some relationships that were put of balance and take time to really care for my health. Maybe all of the stress I was managing needed to be lifted so that I could re-focus and get back on track. Maybe, deep in my soul, I didn't feel like I could do all of this without something dramatic intervening on my behalf. I don't know. Maybe fibro is my greatest teacher. My Lady Doc can only do so much for me. I am the one who has to work on the emotional and spiritual lessons this condition brings up in me. I can use this condition to examine the issues that arise within me and in the process, also learn to be more self-accepting, and as nurturing with myself, as I would be if I were tending to someone else.