Certain disagreeable experiences are in fact good for our spiritual evolution, like a violent thunderstorm that may be unpleasant but brings ample rain to moisten the earth, nourish plants, and make all of nature rejoice. Rejecting life’s challenges, trying to insulate oneself from them, deprives a person of necessary experiences, just as a rain shield leads to aridity.
Difficult experiences cause us to reflect about what is happening and no doubt lead to us making the changes necessary to help us grow—provided we are ready to listen to the underlying message. Otherwise we keep repeating the same old patterns until we finally understand what our experiences are trying to tell us and change our behavior.
The Process of Awakening
The nonconscious tries to speak to us about actions and behavior that are not in accord with our spiritual evolution. It tries to get our attention through physical, psychological, or emotional suffering. At first it sends preliminary messages; then it shouts and screams at us if we don’t listen and are unable to figure out what in our behavior or thinking is discordant with our growth.
It is therefore very important to understand the true meaning behind any pain, illness, and suffering if we really want true and deep healing. That’s why the modern scientific/medical approach of fighting against these deep-seated expressions of our relationship to life in general and to our own life in particular will always be a losing battle. Life will always be one step ahead of us, and we will never manage (thank goodness!) to silence her, to muzzle her.
The more medical science tries to treat an illness through a mechanistic model, the more such an illness becomes even more deep-seated, more difficult to handle, and more capable of mutating—because we are ignoring the deeper message behind the illness.
It is so much better to try to understand what our pain and illness is trying to tell us instead of trying to silence it through pharmaceutical drugs or by enduring it, believing the religious dogma that teaches that suffering is obligatory, inevitable, and deserved because we are “sinners.”
How To Avoid Suffering and Illness
Can we can avoid suffering and illness? Yes, when we really search for new understanding. Even when facing death we can put our pain and suffering into a feedback process in which we look at what the pain is trying to tell us.
Once the underlying causes of pain reach the dense physical level of expression, it is possible for pain to turn around and go in the opposite direction through a process of release and freedom. But this transformation can only take place if we don’t block the densified energies.
By “killing” their expression by medicating ourself or by believing that we somehow deserve to suffer, we interrupt the all-important feedback loop. We prevent the underlying message of pain from moving back up, returning to its source on a more subtle level of the nonconscious, such that at the first opportunity the pain is going to manifest again, releasing not only the energy of tension in that moment, in that context, but also the energy of all the preceding situations that have not been freed up or that we have silenced.
The Process of Liberation
If we block the natural flow of our energy with our inner obstacles—the negative emotions of anger, bitterness, resentment, etc.—the tensions and the suffering remain within us and produce a boomerang effect that feeds on itself and darkens our daily life, just as air pollution creates a more and more opaque dome above our cities.
However, if we don’t block these energies—notably, if we accept pain for what it means on a deeper level, if we even anticipate it in the form of recognizing our own obstacles within and in doing so avoid the need for it to appear outwardly as illness, the process of liberation is set in motion. This manifests on the physical level as relief from suffering and pain, an experience that truly feels like liberation or even a miracle. I do not believe there is anything other than this behind what are described as “miraculous” healings such as spontaneous remissions of cancer that seem so inexplicable by science.
Here I can’t help but think about a spectacular example of this process of liberation that I once encountered. A young woman came to see me for relaxation work and harmonization of her energies. She was very tense and in pain as a result of a seriously herniated disc in the cervical vertebrae and was scheduled to undergo surgery. Locked in a neck brace with her face showing the effects of numerous sleepless nights, she was obviously going through a really hard time.
After doing the initial work of harmonization we were able to get to the heart of her problem, what was really behind her physical suffering. First, I guided her in identifying what emotional trauma could be hidden behind the physical problem. Then we worked on trying to understand what that trauma could mean, how it got etched into her life, and what the real meaning of it was.
What happened was astonishing. As we worked together, without this young woman realizing it, her neck gradually started to visibly let go as she spoke and allowed her tears to flow. More and more she began to move her head, turning it to such an extent that after a while I interrupted her to say, “Do you realize that you are moving your head perfectly normally, without any obvious impediment?”
She stopped speaking for a few seconds then burst out laughing with tears still in her eyes. Her neck brace now served no purpose and neither did her pain. She understood and accepted the sense of the heavy ordeal that had struck her so long ago and she was able to erase the emotional memory that had remained stuck in her neck as severe pain.
Here is what’s important: If she had gone ahead and gotten the surgery, which is what she had done to resolve a herniated disc at an earlier time, she would not have come to the deeper understanding of what had caused so much pain in her life. She would have gone through the pain of surgery without the deeper understanding behind it all, an understanding that resulted in her healing on the physical level.
This example shows how it is very important for us to accept pain as part of a process of discovery. If we can, to whatever extent possible, allow this process to unfold, it will reach a crisis point. Then with realization and understanding the process will shift, and the physical effects of the deeper issue will diminish and eventually completely disappear.
This point of crisis cannot always be reached by everyone suffering from pain, but that’s not what’s most important. What’s important is to go as far as we can in the process, each time making a little more headway. It’s like training in sports—daily stretching opens up the muscles and joints and gradually makes the body more flexible.
Daily work on pain as a process of discovery allows you to gradually open the body. But take care, all of this works in a healthy way only on condition that we act intelligently and not go too far, changing a developmental process into a new form of dysfunctional behavior.
Consciousness Playing the Role of “Door-Keeper”
The awakening of consciousness will help us in this by playing the role of “door-keeper.” By working on the emotions, which exist on both the conscious and the nonconscious levels, we facilitate our own awakening.
This awakening makes its way up to the level of the holographic consciousness, and once there it can choose new experiential modes. It is at this level that the person comes to the phase of acceptance, to the integration of the experience of those deeply felt emotions. This phase is difficult because it belongs to the conscious and present level in which the person continually re encounters existing feelings.
Accepting these difficult emotions instead of pushing them away allows us to look at them in a new way as we integrate the deeper meaning of the experience. This in turn allows for forgiveness, which is fundamental and necessary to the process, as it conditions the shift toward the nonconscious.
If this shift doesn’t take place, the person falls back into the same old pattern, causing him or her to undergo the same physical experiences, often more strongly with each repetition, because the underlying message of the illness has not been accepted and understood.
On the other hand, if the shift is done correctly, the freeing process then moves into the plane of the nonconscious, where the work shifts to a deeper psychological level following the same logic as on the conscious plane, in dreams, for example. In this phase the person must go back to those old, deep inner wounds linked for instance to childhood in order to understand the memories of those hurts and try to sympathize with the emotions they bring up—that is, to accept them and recognize them for what they are, without judging them or struggling against them.
It’s at this level that the real letting go happens, the kind of letting go that occurs when life pushes us to the max. Here we are obliged to let go because to continue fighting against the momentum of the process is useless. There is nothing left to do but to accept what is taking place and forgive if necessary.
This is the letting-go phase, the Christian “Thy will be done” and the Islamic “Inshallah.” At no time is this an abandonment, an abdication; instead it represents an acceptance, an inner welcoming of the way things are that goes beyond our personal ego self. It is at this point that things change in astonishing ways, such that once-inextricable situations seem to turn around completely.
So-called spontaneous remissions occur in people who are in the final stages of cancer and have been diagnosed as terminal. Supposedly nothing more can save them. They have been told that they have very little time left and to get their affairs in order. It is at this moment that certain people shift into this last level, the stage of acceptance, of integration.
In an astonishingly small amount of time (a few days in many cases), their bodies become completely healthy. With acceptance and integration of the deeper meaning of the illness, stagnant energy is freed up and memories of the past are rewritten, leaving room for new interpretations of old memories and choices. It is this final acceptance that facilitates the “miraculous” remission.
If we don’t go through one of these letting-go stages when faced with difficulties, we must inevitably begin the process again until we do accept the reality of the situation.
Of course it is clear that all these processes of discovery function continually, at all levels and with varying degrees of intensity, and not solely by causing serious illnesses or intense suffering. Most of the time they are nonconscious and it is only in difficult cases that they manifest with so much force. However, these processes will continually appear at our densest energetic level, that is, in our physical body.
©2018 by Michel Odoul & Inner Traditions Intl.
Translated from: Dis-moi où tu as mal, je te dirai pourquoi.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Healing Arts Press. www.InnerTraditions.com
Article Source
What Your Aches and Pains Are Telling You: Cries of the Body, Messages from the Soul
by Michel Odoul
Offering keys to decipher what the body is trying to tell us, the author shows that we can learn to see physical ailments not as something caused by chance or fate but as a message from our heart and soul. By releasing the energies and patterns they point to, we can return to a state of health and forward movement on our path through life.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book (or the Kindle edition)
About the Author
Michel Odoul is a shiatsu and psychoenergetic medicine practitioner as well as the founder of the French Institute of Shiatsu and Applied Physical Psychology. He has appeared at numerous health conferences through the world, including the 2013 international meeting of Acupuncturists without Borders. He lives in Paris.
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