Have you ever stopped and thought how amazing your body actually is? All the functions it performs on a daily basis without us noticing. Most people probably haven’t. We take the body and its functions for granted, and don’t pay much attention to the whole cycle of life that happens with every breath we take. It is only when we are plagued with a physical ailment that we start paying attention to our body. Unfortunately, at this point we don’t care about how incredible it is, but instead, are annoyed and frustrated at our body and want the pain to go away. We don’t even want to know why it is hurting, we just want to move on with our day.
For a second though, let’s look at this amazing machine called our body. Every time we take a breath, we supply our lungs with oxygen, and the oxygenated blood is transported to our heart which gives life to us. Consider taking a deep breath, feeling the lung expand and your chest lifting. Isn’t it incredible? Think about your eyes looking at a screen, reading these words your brain understanding what these words say. Think about the sense of smell that evokes some memory. Every organ serves a function to not only help interpret the world, but to digest, transform, and protect the body. There is this incredible network of nerves and a system which has the ability to send signals to the brain and spinal cord from all over the body to interpret and accordingly action something. Think about you touching a hot stove and before you even string the thoughts together that the stove is hot, your hand has already been moved by your body’s intelligence. Think about when you cut yourself and how quickly platelets rush to the open wound to try and form a clot to stop the bleeding, and you watch over the next few days or weeks how your body rebuilds your skin. You would have to agree that the body is quite incredible. It eliminates the things we don’t need; it keeps and converts the things we do need. It just knows what to do.
When the time comes, where we feel pain or suffer from a disease, we get annoyed, frustrated and even angry at our body and/or ourselves. Sometimes the discomfort is so severe that we question what we have possibly done to deserve this. We get too caught up in how inconvenient our ailment is, instead of considering why this happened in the first place and ignore the possibility that the body might be trying to communicate with us. It also never crosses our minds how we abuse our body daily by not only feeding it junk food and leading mostly sedentary lifestyles, but also feeding it negative thoughts for most of our days. We read the news, we listen to news (which are mostly negative), we listen to people complain, maybe we even complain, we even tell ourselves that nothing good is happening in our lives and we wonder why our bodies are falling apart.
When we are struck with an illness, we think that our body must be against us. We go as far as hating a particular part of our body or all of our body because it is not behaving how we want it to. This way of thinking can be so detrimental, especially when we consider that our body is simply just trying to communicate with us and let us know that something is not in alignment; that we are out of alignment. Even looking at the word disease, or ‘dis-ease’, means something is out of order, not in flow, not in ease. Our body’s system is smart and let’s us know in various ways that things are not going well. The body is simply trying to say “hey, listen here, this way of living, this food, this exercise, this inaction, this running around, this way of thinking, this ….. you name it, is not working for us and we need to find a better way”.
Sometimes the way our body communicates is the result of thinking and it could be argued that we have manifested an ailment. I know this sounds far-fetched. But is it? Think about it. Think back to when you didn’t want to go on this school trip and all of a sudden you got stomach sick because you were anxious about something. The anxiety which is a mental thing, created a physical response. Think about that time you were so nervous about a meeting, that all of a sudden you had unexplained stomach pains. Think about every time an old injury plays up. Is that because you have some stressors going on? People have heart-attacks because of stress, stomach ulcers because of anger, headaches because they constantly overthink. We absolutely have the ability to manifest illnesses or injuries. Is it because we are attached to always having something wrong with us and it has even become our identity and people know us for it? People say “oh there is just always something wrong with you”. Maybe we subconsciously try to live up to that. Maybe we have even learnt that this is the only way how we get attention and so we keep reinventing the same or even different ailments. Sometimes, when the flu strikes, at most often at the most inconvenient time, it could be as simple as the body trying to tell us that we need to rest. Sure, there could be a hundred different reasons for it too but we never contemplate that maybe we just need to listen within. Sometimes it is just an unfortunate event, but other times it is absolutely us ignoring our bodies’ needs and also playing out some unresolved internal issues on our bodies.
In truth, the body does not want to hurt. It wants to be healthy. It wants to function and it wants to be in homeostasis. It does not want to go against us, it just tries to communicate with us but somehow, we are still not listening. We still try to push through. And when the body stops us in our tracks, no amount of getting annoyed and no amount of outsmarting the body will help with healing. We have to stop that and we also have to stop feeling sorry for ourselves when something bad happens. By us turning against our body and ourselves, we just create more of the same. Instead, we have to facilitate the healing process. We have to feed the body what it craves and that is very unique for each one of us. So let go of whatever you think the body needs to do and give it what it actually needs; sometimes that is discipline to awake at an odd hour and exercise it, and at other times, it is deep rest to reset. Know the difference and explore the pain. Explore what truly pains you. Is it some emotion, is it the shitty thoughts you think, is it that you keep running around non-stop? Whatever it is, find a way to let go. Some ailments are more complicated than others and may require some assistance, but don’t turn against your body. Understand that it is an intelligent way of letting you know that something is not in alignment and you have the power to change that. It is within your power to heal yourself if you dare to explore what truly pains you. Find the courage to look within and love your body because it loves you.