Root Cause

 

“A healthy body attends to the pain of the weakest part.”Paul Brand

Recently I experienced debilitating back pain seemingly from nowhere. After a few minutes of contemplating my options with the sole aim of getting rid of the pain as fast as possible, I took a deep breath and sat down slowly. From what I know, pain is a messenger not the message; a signal or a sign pointing the way to a cause, not the destination. So I had some searching or clue following to do.

Indeed my clues led me to an emotional issue I was trying to push down because it was too overwhelming to deal with at the time, or so I thought. In my efforts to push the stressor out of my consciousness, it got pushed alright! And it settled on my back where it was now paralysing me with pain and I could not move. Since I was now a captive audience for my emotions, I had a choice to make. Face it and deal with it or pop a pain killer and postpone it to a later date. Unfortunately, the second option would have required that I get myself out of my house and go to the chemist but even getting up from the chair at that moment was excruciating.

How many of us are medicating fear, anxiety, anger, abandonment, bitterness, disappointment, frustration, guilt, offence, rejection, and any other emotional pain out there? You may just be setting out on the journey with a headache, stomach ache, or a backache that suddenly appeared or you may be way ahead and you now have a diagnosis of asthma, arthritis, cancer, high blood pressure, migraines, fibromyalgia, addictions, and a host of other diseases that doctors often can’t trace the cause of.

Unfortunately, our medical systems are more of disease care systems and there is usually no focus or time to dig into the root cause of an issue. Instead, we are quickly given a prescription for our symptoms and sent on our merry way but as time goes by, only an introspective person stops to evaluate and realize that their pain is only getting worse, they have become a walking pharmacy or better yet, they are now in the ‘hapa-na-pale’ syndrome category where everything has it’s day to hurt.

Do you ever take time to review your day, your week, your month, your year? Do you think back on things that were said or done to you that in the moment caused you discomfort? Do you come back to process, forgive and let go or make decisions that affect how you move forward? Are you ever going and never stopping – even a car needs to be serviced every so many kilometres. Out of self awareness of the harm I might be doing to myself by medicating symptoms, I got rid of the entire contents of my medicine cabinet and left only band aids, activated charcoal tablets and essential oils. I made a decision to henceforth speak to my body before I punished it for bringing me a vital message that I could use to change course and set right a situation for which my body had lovingly come to warn me about.

Prayer, meditation, journaling, good quality sleep, an Epsom salt bath, a workout, a long slow walk, a 30-minute stretching session, a massage, a heart to heart chat with a dear friend, a hike, a calming playlist, a creative hobby, a swim. . .the possibilities for a time-out, self reflection and self care are endless. Act on your emotional distractions before you deal with the physical symptoms unless there is a broken bone or a bleeding wound.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C.S. Lewis