When Your Body Gives You Difficulty

Its wonderful when our bodies feel great and we don’t have to struggle to get up out of bed each day. But in each person’s life comes a time when something will happen that isn’t so easy, physically. When this happens suddenly, the world stops and we have to listen to what it wants. 

First of all, of course if you take care of your body when its healthy, it’ll handle the difficult times better. I’ve written countless articles about eating well, exercising regularly, taking good vitamins and omega fatty acids to help support the healthy times. 

Beyond our physical bodies, we are spiritual beings. Our bodies are the vessels of our spirits. Whenever we have a physical difficulty, especially one that doesn’t get “better” quickly, our spirits are either trying to tell us something, or help us process something that needs to be healed. 

I’ve spoken about my 20/30/50 healing path before. Any physical issue we have can be examined from this point of view. 20% of the issue can be looked at from a purely physical point – for example, if you have a sore ankle. Maybe you twisted it when you fell off those high heels. The physical part of this injury is that you have an injured ligament which needs some sort of physical intervention. If the injury is bad enough, you will have to avoid walking on your foot for a few days. Or you will have to wear flats until it feels better. Maybe you’ll need acupuncture to help it heal faster, or physical therapy to strengthen your ligaments. 

30% of the issue is lifestyle related. In the case of our sprained ankle, the issue was wearing high heels while walking too fast. The fix would be to have stronger ankles, maybe doing more exercises regularly to help strengthen your ankles will make it easier to walk in high heels.

50% is related to emotional/spiritual concerns. From the Chinese Medicine point of view, disease either comes from inside your body, or outside. Disease from outside your body is some sort of infection that is allowed to enter your body because something allowed it in – your immune system. Each organ system has emotional and spiritual functions. When a person has an emotional experience, it is recorded somewhere in her physical body. Later when she has an illness or “dis-ease” she may have forgotten that emotion but her body hasn’t. 

We go about our lives largely not aware that we are processing experiences all day. Just stand on a busy street corner some time and watch what’s happening. People are driving, stopping, walking, talking, doing things, paying attention to the business of their lives. Imagine that your body is that busy street corner. All sorts of things are going on without your thinking about them all day. Breathing, pumping blood, digesting food, processing toxins, shooting out thoughts, seeing things, etc. When your body is giving you trouble somehow, its calling attention to itself so that you will stop for a minute and ask….”what’s happening?”

Sometimes the difficulty is fairly simple such as strengthening your ankles so that you can wear high heels, or not wearing high heels. Sometimes its more difficult, such as having chronic digestive problems. When its difficult, its time to begin to think about which emotions might be involved and how to heal them. It doesn’t mean that you don’t do physical things to heal it. 50% of healing involves some physical and lifestyle interventions. But the other half is some emotional and spiritual work.