Many years ago having experienced an outpouring of grief and tears. It was old stuck energy, after receiving a homeopathic treatment. I’d been on antidepressants and major tranquilisers which suppressed my symptoms for some years, but didnt get to the root cause or allow me to truly feel and ex-press the pain fully. My physical and mental symptoms, my health, just seemed to be getting worse from when I first started taking them at 16 years old – not better. It is easy to misguidely believe that our health is just getting worse. However after the cathartic release of the homeopathic remedy man mur, I started to view the concept of health and healing differently from mainstream views of health. I felt lighter, more energised, and more at peace for a while for just letting it go.
We have come to fear illness as something bad ‘to be fought’, suggesting that the body is ‘doing a bad thing’, rather than symptoms being an intelligent process and reflection of the body’s amazing ability to heal and cope with toxic or life-threatening situations. Homeostasis attempts to resolve and rebalance that which is out of balance. It’s said that when we have symptoms the body is already healing, if we would only trust the process.
Learning from illness
We are hesitant to sit with discomfort and let our body and mind learn and grow from that. Some seeds need to sit in the dark to germinate. Many of us aren’t taught, or aware of how to begin to take personal responsiblity for and master discomfort and relax with it. Understandably, we go for the convenient option of popping a pill. We’re in a culture of just wanting to get on with illness and life. However, is this process of ‘doing doing doing’ leading us to higher and higher figures for disease like cancer and auto-immune conditions? Something isn’t working! Rather than getting to the root cause of illness, suppressive medications are used. They may be useful if used discriminately in life-threatening situations where a swift intervention is needed, such as stroke. However, it’s my guess that rarely are those with high bloood pressure advised about hydrating themselves properly with water and how something as seemingly simple as that may help significantly. So in many cases the pill doesn’t seek to resolve how the imbalance came about for chronic illnesses. Instead the indiscriminate use of medications such as antibiotics has now been shown to cause super-bugs. What are the over-use of vaccinations leading us to when so many fit and healthy people, even before the pandemic, were being offered a flu jab for instance? Instead of being encouraged to trust our immunity, we are presented with more and more fear which has perhaps now become part of our internal toxic load.
An internal toxic environment
Chronic illness is the ‘consequence of an internal toxic environment’. It is often toxicity that has built up over time and hasn’t ocured overnight. It is a long-term illness that the person experience’s repeatedly or daily and is usually felt less severely than an acute illness, like going down a gear. It maybe layers of dis-ease, or experiences, which have been suppressed and compounded by poor lifestyle choices, medications, vaccinations, dehydration, poor diet, too much alcohol or caffeine, traumatic experiences or repeated negative thought patterns, all of which are pushed deep into the body. Numerous acidifying events and exposure to multiple toxins create a picture of deep toxicity. Chronic illness maybe the body’s way of preventing death from a life-threatening acute illness, that couldn’t be expressed/eliminated out of the body such as glandular fever or meningitis, and was therefore not resolved. Examples of chronic illness are rheumatoid arthritis, arthritis, fibromyalgia, diabetes, irritable bowel and alzheimers.
Denial
The outpouring of old grief that came up after a homeopathic remedy, was like getting a dammed up river flowing again, as layers of my grief and fear came up as well as some of my toxicity. If good health is like a flowing river, illness is a dried or silted up river that is dammed up, stopped or suppressed (with medications, attitudes etc). Over time it becomes chronic disease. It can’t flow freely. The bodies attempt to rebalance may cry out for help and attention, by attempting to carve a different path – eroding riverbanks, potentially causing more problems, morphing into other illnesses too. It takes a huge amount of energy to suppress consciously or subconsciously our anger for instance, to keep pushing it down, to find the energy to distract ourselves from it. So many of us are in that river in Eygpt – deNile!
If we have a cold and take a cold medication to stop the flow of mucous and keep it inside, are we also keeping the waste in our body? Mucous is the body’s way of packaging up waste or toxins that the body doesn’t need anymore. It damns up the internal river. Over time if we keep doing that via various means (antibiotics, steroids etc) we may become silted up and the flow of life stops and becomes a chronic dis-ease. How we get old stuck energy to flow again is the choice of therapies and techniques that we may instinctively sometimes be drawn to using, such as reiki, naturopathy, homeopathy, accupuncture, detoxificition techniques such as coffee enemas and so on.
Acutes
If we have an acute illness, such as tonsillitis, coughs, colds, flu, diarrhea, rashes, vomiting, headaches, stomach aches or inflammatory flare ups such as sciatica OR our internal resources or vitality (vital force/energy levels) are already low, the body may not be able to cope. Instead of dying during an overwhelming acute onset of illness, the body can change gear and ‘morph’ (change) symptoms or dis-ease, to take intense pressure off the process. We then may experience chronic illness, which in it’s own way is the body trying to balance itself. The symptoms of an acute can be a flag for what’s occuring at a root level, eg is there nausea reflecting a liver imbalance? If we silence the flags by giving an anti-emetic to stop that sickness or ignore the indicators, dis-ease maybe push deeper into the body to a chronic level of illness. An example of this might be having steroids for asthma, which may then ‘morph’ into eczema. So we not only have asthma, but eczema as well.
Holistic, naturopathic or homeopathic health takes the whole being into account. These approaches aim to support the body in the best way possible to allow the symptoms, on an individual level, to be heard, seen, felt and allowed to flow so that the root level can be understood. Allowing the re-balancing to unfold can bring wellness back into play, without having to continually take tablets to manage a condition.
It’s the ‘acute that cures the chronic’
From this perspective we are able to embrace an acute illness as being an experience which can help to undamn the river and get it flowing again if we can push through it, without suppressive interventions. Acutes are short-lived, intense and uncomfortable illnesses that can be quite awful. They do however demonstrate that the person has the vitality, the energy, for their river to flow instead of being stagnant, stuck or silted up. If we have chronic conditions (silted up) and we don’t have ‘acutes’, eg colds, it can be a sign that vital force or our energy levels need to be stimulated, eg our battery levels topped up. If you think of a log that is stuck in the river and the water is flowing slowly around it, unable to move it and a boat can’t get past. Along comes some heavy rain and with that vital force of the rain shifts the log so the river can flow again. Shifting the log may be uncomfortable, and take effort, but afterwards the flow is better, the water clearer. I always find that I have more energy, and other things improve when I have gone through an acute.
My hand has had some arthritis and being a massage therapist I was concerned that I couldn’t unscrew jars. However, with naturopathic techniques a sore arm pain was my acute for relieving the chronic arthritic pain in my hand. (and I’m also doing handstands now in yoga!!)
‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’
So the acute can also build and strengthen immunity, for example the chicken pox party and the ‘upgrade to the immune system. I find this a much more positive and optimistic slant than feeling i have to wage war on bacteria and viruses. Get down in the mud! There is a reason for letting kids do that, as the multitude of organisms help to support our own microbiome or gut flora (as well as grass fed meat!) ‘Acutes are the resolution’, as they help to reduce the toxic load of the body, by eliminating toxins. However, if they are suppressed – which as previously mentioned is sometimes necessary in life threatening circumstances – they can become chronic illness. This isn’t to say that if things get severe we don’t seek medical intervention, just that we look at other ways to support our health hopefully before we even get to that point.
Our day to day living means being mindful of our environments, our toxic load from eg personal care products, surrounding ourselves with supportive people, exercising regularly and making good health choices such as wholesome nutrition. Educating ourselves on how to support our health and having a good healthcare practitioner who supports our journey from chronic to acute can also contribute significantly to our vitality.