Why me? Why now?
The Root Cause of Illness
My earliest memory was when I had pneumonia at age 2. I don’t remember feeling ill, I remember only sitting in the back of an ambulance. This was 1968 and there were no seatbelts, just seating running down each side of the interior. My Mum sat on one side, my dad opposite. I was sitting with my Dad looking directly at my Mother who held her head in her hands. I felt so bad that she was on her own on that side of the ambulance, I knew she needed comfort, so I got up to sit next to her.
There we were, facing my Dad, now he was all alone. He was looking out of the back window, I was worried for him, so I shifted sides again. Apparently this went on for the whole journey. When I relayed this memory to my mother decades later she remembered it;
“I was so embarrassed” , she told me, “you were supposed to be really ill and then wouldn’t sit still in the ambulance!”.
This memory has served me as a beautiful example of the connection between mind and body and tells the beginning of the story of how I came to have a Hysterectomy at age 49.
How can that memory possibly be connected to a physical illness nearly 50 years later?
We all carry a story about our past.
Our experiences shape our thoughts, reactions, behaviours and also our physical body.
Understanding our story helps us understand who we are now. This understanding does not heal our physical issues, but it does help us KNOW ourselves more deeply and begin to recognise that we are not random victims of ill health, dis-ease grows in our bodies BECAUSE of our story.
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”.
– C.S. Lewis
FORTY Six years later I reached a crisis point. I was anaemic, exhausted and really quite ill. I had grown a huge fibroid, which the doctors told me required a hysterectomy.
‘Surgery won’t solve the problem that created it’ my homeopath warned me.
And even though I knew that in my gut, I was desperate and felt it was the only way.
After the operation I recovered well, but in the year following I developed a couple of autoimmune diseases, a major tooth issue, lost my Dad, and then left my husband of 27 years.
It was only after all of this that I REALLY began healing the wounds that had been festering inside me since my 2 year old self sat uncomforted in the ambulance.
It turned out that my homeopath and my gut instinct were right.
The fibroids were gone, but the cause had not been healed by the surgery. In fact when my body no longer had a place to store all of the negative feelings that I didn’t want to look at, my discomfort started to bubble up in other ways. It was like suddenly drawing back a curtain to reveal a view I’d never seen before. The person I felt I was and wanted to be, was buried beneath a pile of ‘shoulds’ that other people had created.
Connecting the dots:
Everything I needed to learn about my physical and emotional ‘programming’ was all encapsulated in that memory.
At 2 years old I was already people pleasing. and taking responsibility for how others felt
In that ambulance I was aware that my mother was anxious and couldn’t cope with a difficult situation, I felt responsible for her pain, after all it was my fault we were there in the first place. I took on the role of comforter, fixer.
That situation was NOT about my needs, it was about theirs.
I was already adapting my behaviour to create and maintain a connection with my care givers.
This is an inbuilt human survival mechanism, we fear rejection as that equates to death in our more primitive brain, we are hard wired to attach to adults for our survival.
The adaptations we make to avoid rejection in childhood effect our future reactions, decisions, relationships, in fact EVERYTHING in our lives including our physical body.
The deeper message of that memory helped me understand that my 2 year old self had already learnt that -
to be accepted meant I had to meet other people’s expectations.
my behaviour sometimes effected people negatively, so I had to bury the ‘unacceptable’ parts of me.
love was conditional.
my needs didn’t matter as much as other people’s.
I had to GIVE in order to be loved.
to be quiet, to be independent, to be clever were the best strategies to cope with my family dynamic.
However all those things I learnt were not who I truly was inside. I was sensitive, loud, messy, creative and much more. All those traits were subdued or shutdown in order to fit in. And this is where we learn to betray our true nature in favour of survival.
The answer to illness in the present is to be found in the supressions’s of the past.
We came here to fulfill a potential; just like an acorn has the potential to be a mighty oak, we too hold a potential to grow and expand in our lives. The direction of that growth is something you feel within you, a whisper, a niggle, a calling. That part of yourself, could be called your higher self, your inner voice, your authentic self, but however you describe it,
its there,
calling you
everyday.
It is an energy that works through every cell.
Whenever we act against the inner voice, it shouts to us.
We feel it in our body.
When we say ‘Yes OK’ instead of ‘NO’ there is a conflict of interest between the inner voice and the conditioned mind.
We live everyday with these kinds of subconscious conflicts acting out like an internal soap opera.
We become so used to the thought chatter that it gets tuned out and pushed down. This doesn’t stop the noise, but we do muffle the sound so instead it becomes a felt vibration of discomfort inside rather than words.
Like a bass note that you feel at a concert, our physicality responds to that beat of being inauthentic.
That vibration communicates outwards through our energy and it attracts more of the same,
more of the same conflicts
and more of the same ‘type’ of issues that we first experienced in childhood.
For example; I attracted more people to comfort and more disconnection from receiving.
These wars with ourselves create imbalance within us, and the lack of harmony disrupts the delicate equilibrium in the systems of our physical body. Just as we see the breakdown of ecosystems on the planet, we feel the physical effects of these emotional imbalances a long time after the problem began.
When illness, discomfort or disease arrives in our lives, it's a sign that the imbalance can be tolerated no more.
A sign that NOW is an opportunity to resolve what began in the past.
Disconnection with your inner voice is what brought you to this point in your life, reconnection to it is the pathway of healing.
Retraining your nervous system to react differently, changing long held thought and belief patterns, adopting a different drumbeat are the sharp stones we walk on as we navigate the way to health and happiness.
Although it feels like a more difficult landscape at the beginning, the path will eventually open into the most glorious view.