I believe the body speaks in metaphors on behalf of the spirit.  Illness brings a message from the inner planes that we likely ignored earlier on when our emotions attempted to signal us. I have learned that is if I respond to the early messages from my emotional body, then physical illness does not manifest.  The gift of illness is that it provides us an opportunity to re-right our lives and realign with our soul’s desires.

Recently, I began to have some troubling physical symptoms and attempted to heal myself by doing all the called for regimes, the appropriate remedies, tonics, diet, exercise etc.  But I was not getting results and was getting worse. When nothing worked, I probed for some deeper spiritual meaning. What could the metaphor of this illness be?  Why might I need this?  What is the message that my body is bringing?

The back story is that I am really driven, okay, obsessive and hyper-focused. Lingering beneath my passion for what I do is a quieter voice that I often suppress. Though I was loving my projects and all I was accomplishing, I was not pausing enough for something else that I also really love.  I was missing a whole part of life that I truly have a desire to participate in! It is the part where you stretch out, look around, sigh, wiggle your toes and twittle your thumbs.  It is the part of me that just wants to smell the breeze, cook, chew, lay in the grass and stare off into space, basically accomplishing nothing.

Once, I responded and made the effort to bring doing and non-doing into greater balance, my body was able to heal along with the support of my other remedies.   It is a wonderful kind of magic and a science as well. I bow to my body for alerting me to all that I would be missing in my compulsive doing, even though I was doing what I love.

Though we are conditioned to fear illness, it really is an important opportunity to re-orient ourselves to the life that we truly want.  And because illness tends to be no fun, we hopefully can learn to sensitize ourselves to the earlier signals.  Finding the meaning in our illnesses and conditioning ourselves not to fear them is how we reclaim and empower the innate healer within.