By: Dr. Eva Selhub
Your body has a message for you. It speaks clearly and with great accuracy. It is like your best friend, the one who tells you the truth even though it may be difficult to hear.
Your body speaks to you through discomfort or "feelings" to alert you that there is some sort of problem or imbalance inside our outside your body. When all is well, the body stays silent. When a problem exists in these systems, the body speaks up. First it communicates subtly, in whispers - a pang in the neck, a tingle in the stomach, fatigue, feeling run down or out-of-sorts.
Eventually, if you do not heed its whispers, the body can start to scream - through crippling pain, chronic conditions, or acute illness.
Often, physical symptoms often tell a deeper tale about you and the unresolved pain and false negative beliefs you have accumulated about yourself, other people and the world. For instance, a physical symptom like queasiness in your stomach can signal your belief that "I am not deserving of love just the way I am." A lower back pain tells you, "I am not safe."
A subtle ache in your chest says, "If I do not act the way people want, they will abandon me."
Dr. Selhub fuses East and West when it comes to understanding the human mind and body. Structural and real problems exist in the body, but that doesn't mean symptoms have to manifest themselves. Healers in the ancient wisdom traditions understood this.
They viewed the body as a landscape of nature, so that symptoms and problems were viewed in a whole picture--associated with life circumstances, beliefs, feelings, and seasonal changes.
To Dr. Selhub, a person with heart palpitations may very likely have a structural problem with their heart that is causing an arrhythmia. But interestingly, the problem only happens under certain circumstances. Why doesn't it happen all of the time? Dr. Selhub says that in her experience, the structural problem in the heart may also represents a psycho-spiritual problem related to that person's fears of being connected or close to others.
This doesn't mean that addressing the psychospiritual component is a cure-it just means that you will be taking care of as many issues as possible that are causing your body to fall apart so that you can remain resilient and strong.
Here is the process for resilience:
- Building an infrastructure-sleep, exercise, nutrition, meditation, humor, support/love, spirituality.
- Witnessing physiology-paying attention to the signals of the body.
- Reprogramming-old beliefs that are lodged in the body.
