More FREE than the BODY

More FREE than the BODY.

This is an issue that many people who are chronically sick and suffering pain bring to Amoda’s spiritual Satsang meetings seeking an answer that really delivers.
It is a tough question when there is constant pain and endless illness.
‘What do I do?’
‘How do I cope?”
‘I know I am not the body but it hurts so much I never have any peace.’
‘I am scared, angry, anxious.’
‘How do I deal with pain?’

These are some of the questions.

Here is my only insightful response to those questions, and it is my own challenge and endeavor. And it is tough.

TO BE MORE FREE AS CONSCIOUSNESS THAN THE BODY.

If that sounds weird, or impossible, I understand. But its what we are going to be propelled towards at the time of death anyway. At the time of death we are not given an option. We are pushed, dragged, or thrown towards freedom from the body. We can hang on all we like but at some point we must let go of it.
At that point we will realize WE ARE NOT THE BODY.
WE ARE CONSCIOUSNESS.
YOU are consciousness that has a body to live in this relative world. You cannot live here without it.
But it is not who you are.

SO. If it were possible to realize that fundamental truth, that you are not the body, while you are in the body, not theoretically but viscerally, you would be MORE FREE THAN THE BODY.

And as that freedom you would care much less about it.
You would not grasp as it as you might do.
You would not feel as anxious or scared about it.
You would, in fact, allow it to do its thing much more.

In fact your capacity to love yourself would increase dramatically.

It might have an impact on your nervous system and immune system.

But you would have that most sacred quality.

FREEDOM.

What I have just said is tough. It is about enlightenment, true awakening, surrender, humility, grace, and the deepest love.

I hope you understand. This is where I am at.

Advertisements

Chronic Disease and the Magic Bullet Syndrome

This weekend I was asked again about how I healed Ulcerative Colitis by a third party who was trying to ‘help’ someone in their family who was desperate and suffering. I have been asked this question in various forms many times, and been asked for ‘tips and suggestions’ about what to do.

And I have to say there is something about the asking of these questions in this way that frustrates me so much.

Why?

Because it implicitly suggests and hopes that healing a major chronic disease is something that can be done easily without making much change or dramatic transformation, as if there is some secret ‘magic bullet’ that I found that instantly solved the whole thing and allowed me to carry on with my life the same way without changing anything.

I dont mean this implicit suggestion is even conscious on the questioners part, or the sufferers part. It comes more from not knowing and desperately hoping that they won’t have to do THAT much.

Because the simple fact is that people don’t want to change that much. Even when they are ill. It may sound shocking but a lot of people are so stuck in their lives, emotions, habits, thoughts and beliefs, that they would rather endure chronic illness than venture beyond the safety zone of their lives and step into the unknown. The mind and emotions desperately want safety and security of the known. And that is what you have to leave behind if you are going to heal anything.

It is exactly the same journey and challenge on the spiritual path. You cannot reach awakening or enlightenment while your strongest desire is to stay in the realm of the known, which is where it is most comfortable.

Here is where it gets a bit strange. It is called the ‘comfort zone’ but actually I’ve never met anyone inside it who is very comfortable. True comfort is found where comfort zone dissolves and the walls of false protection come crumbling down.
There is no place for what is false in spirituality OR healing.

So to return to my point. When I get asked these questions I have to respond truthfully. This is the kind of thing I say.

Dear ……

The journey of healing for me was an extraordinary undertaking that totally changed my life. I didn’t expect it but it happened because I surrendered to it and gave myself to it 100% without holding anything back. It took at least 10 years of dedication and struggle, self love and warrior-like strength.

It doesn’t have to take that long for everyone BUT it DOES take the same amount of courage and resourcefulness. Chronic illness, by the time it manifests as symptoms, has probably been lurking in the system for many years. It has something to do with many aspects of one’s life, from the physical to the emotional and the mental. Some of those things can be changed, looked at and transformed. There is no magic bullet to this, although there are helpful things. It is a big journey and a profound invitation for those who experience it. It is actually life itself rising up and saying, ‘Something you have been doing, some ways of living, eating, thinking, some emotions you have been carrying, no longer serve you and you need to change them.’

The experiencer can take that message as self blame or self negation, in which case they will suffer more, or they can step up to the challenge and make a big decision that they will meet this with openness, strength, vulnerability, willingness and power.’ With those qualities, with a lot of support, preferably from natural healers, functional doctors, and appropriate therapists, then that person will, step by step, slowly slowly, go on their journey. No one knows where it will lead. That is the mystery.

But I will guarantee you that it will change them, make them deeper and wiser, more self loving, more aware, more powerful, and more knowledgable than any course in pharmaceutical medication could.

And they may heal their chronic illness.

Thats why it’s difficult to offer tips and suggestions.

With great love and kindness.

Kavi’

Worrying about things that don’t happen – is catastrophic for the body

I just wrote this post on Facebook and it was my most popular! Is everyone suffering from this?

Worrying about things that don’t happen is one of the chief causes of adrenal stress, immune compromise and nervous system meltdown.
It is not only a spiritual issue. It is a mental and emotional issue, and very much a physical one.
There you have it, a truly holistic experience!
I know this syndrome intimately as I have been very vulnerable to it most of my life and have now largely ‘tamed’ it. It comes with a ‘vata’ disposition, according to Ayurveda. (The vata dosa, or body type, is prone to anxiety and fear)

Worrying about things that don’t happen is a fixation that must be met with openness and willingness to face the fear. We feed it the fuel it wants by turning away from it or being overly reactive to it. We lose our discernment and become hyper anxious.

That hyper anxiety hits the body hard, and is ultimately useless and destructive.

I recently returned from a trip to the east coast of USA. We accidentally got my name wrong on the flight booking, and that caused me considerable anxiety. I imagined they wouldn’t let me on the flight. I actually became quite stressed about the whole thing. Add to that I thought our luggage was over weight, and we didn’t have enough time to get everything done and I was all over the place!

Guess what? It was a big lesson.
a. They didn’t care about the name and changed it in a moment.
b. The luggage was fine.
c. We had loads of time and were still at the airport early.
d. I stressed over absolutely nothing.

Luckily I have learned not to take out this anxiety on anyone else, particularly loved ones. I keep it to myself as much as possible.

But the point I’m making is I worried about things that didn’t happen. And it began to screw around with my body.
Acute anxiety or chronic anxiety, it doesn’t matter, it still degrades the body integrity and must be met with softness and love.

The effect of this unnecessary worry on the body can be catastrophic. From adrenal fatigue to ramped up immune system, to liver tightness, high cortisol levels, risk of heart attack, rashes, and serious digestive problems, this is not some minor issue. Even cancer may be fueled by major worry.

It is a chronic and societal problem that must be faced individually and collectively. 

What can you do?

You can do so much to reduce this heavyweight problem.

All endeavors will help. Here are some ideas that I use.

Meditation. Spending time in nature. Exercise. Relaxation.Visualization. 
Spiritual inquiry. Healing old wounds and traumas. Understanding one’s mind and belief systems.
Magnesium. Detoxification. Nourishment with healthy and organic vegetables and salads.
Decreasing acidic and stimulating foods and drinks. NO COCA COLA!
Love.

Let me know what you think, or whether you worry about things that don’t happen and what strategies you employ, if any, to help reduce it’s damaging effects.

And thanks for reading!

Reactivity in Auto Immune Conditions and Inflammation

Please do not take this as scientific proof. If you are looking for modern science you probably wont find it here. This blog and website is only about ideas that might be possible.

As I always say in my blogs and posts, find out for yourself what is true. Believe nothing unless you truly believe it deeply inside. And if you don’t know, be ok with not knowing and make your inquiry into healthy living and illness come from an unknown perspective.

Basically, develop discernment and inner wisdom, it will serve you for life and help others who also don’t know.

My conversations are speculative and holistic. I’m trying to connect dots that medical science doesn’t want to, or can’t, or won’t, connect. Mainly that means exploring the connection between matter and thought, or body and mind you might say.

I want to look at patterns, beliefs, language, energy fields, that sort of thing. I truly believe we only have a small bit of the puzzle of being human. Most of the rest of the puzzle will not be found in science or conventional medicine.

But the puzzle and the mystery is where the exciting stuff is. That’s where I like to dig around. I am an investigator and explorer.

So I have been contemplating the nature of auto immune conditions, described by conventional medicine as ‘self attacking self,’ and decided to talk a little about how our emotional mental ‘reactivity’ to life, thought and situations may play a very big part in perpetuating the suffering of self attack.

The key here is to understand why reactivity, particularly over-reactivity, is happening on the mental, emotional level, and to attempt to ease it down and relax it. In my world awareness and understanding is fundamental in the healing.

Reactivity tends to come from fear. That fear can be fear of danger, fear of lack of safety, threat to life, violence or extreme vulnerability. Fear is an existential issue we all have somewhere deep within. People with trauma, childhood wounds, acute sensitivity (sometimes from birth trauma) and unstable childhoods are prone to this fear more than most. This fear is visceral, it’s not simply emotional or mental. It becomes physical, make no mistake. And that physicality we now know (through science and biology) can affect our gut microbiome, digestive process, gut permeability, ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, and adrenal glands, as well as the whole body. Every physical effect I have just stated impacts the immune system.

The deeper trouble with this is that it sets up a chronic pattern that may lock us in for life. If these things are happening in childhood and youth we learn them as survival mechanisms and repeat them every time something real OR IMAGINED reminds us of the old trauma. It doesn’t have to be a real threat, it can just be the thought of it or something similar. In fact much of this reactivity will happen IN ANTICIPATION of trouble THAT ACTUALLY DOESN’T HAPPEN.

This has been one of my ongoing life stories revealed to me over the years through various body work therapies, deep inner exploration and more recently chiropractic testing. I developed a secret inner part of me that was always alert to danger, always on the look out and hyper vigilant, whether I was asleep or not. The consequences of this are serious and disturbing, both physically and mentally. Physically it means being always in reactivity mode and high alert, and never able to get into deep restful delta sleep where healing and renewal comes from.

It means immune system and nervous system are on constant alert to danger. It began in my early teens during my parents slide into acrimonious divorce and my slide into ‘out of control’ drug taking chaos. It has lasted a lifetime (the effect not the drugs!), and been mostly hidden from view but had massive repercussions on my relationships, purpose in life and most important on my physical health. Specifically on my immune health, gut health, and now thyroid health. It also resulted in addiction problems.

So what does this say?

Well I actually see this reactivity, this over active ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, at play in many people I work with, and almost always with those who experience some form of auto immunity. And it can disguise itself in many ways. Being over critical of self or others is one way, being self hating (remember the ‘self attacking self’ phrase at the beginning of this article?), being extremely resentful, being highly anxious, fearful, angry or depressed are all permutations of the same thing, reactivity.

This blog piece is just the beginning of a much bigger conversation about mind and body and trauma, and about how the immune system gets over activated when we are young.

If we accept that reactivity might be an issue both physically and emotionally it gives us knowledge and insight, and puts us in a greater position to be able to take action.

What action? I am going to discuss this next time.

I would love to hear from you what you think, as I really don’t have all the answers, but thousands of questions that I love exploring.

And the next piece I think will be how to turn our unhealthy reactivity to a healthy and calm responsiveness so we can maintain calm in our inner world.

Thank you so much for reading, and please please comment and add something to the conversation. And share this is you feel moved to.

WHOLENESS IS OUR NATURAL STATE

How ‘whole’ are you? It is an interesting question most people have not, nor will ever, contemplate. I have and I do, all the time. I don’t think this is just a spiritual question, I actually think its a health question, and a very important existential question. It matters. A LOT. Here is a post I just wrote on my ‘Holistic Life Facebook Page.’

“I have spent 15 years attending to my wellbeing and to the relationship between body, mind and spirit.

In that time I have experienced a 180 degree turn around in how I live, what I focus on and how I relate to life itself.

It has been, and still is, a profound transformation.

Both simple and complex. And my awareness of the divine running through everything only increases day by day.

At first I thought it was just the body that was faltering with all its angry symptoms.

That took me directly into my emotions, which were tangled up, fearful, old and also angry.

That took me to all my thoughts and beliefs, the fundamentals of my everyday life, some of them very toxic and negative.

And finally I arrived at my spiritual essence, the nature of truth and love and reality itself.

Each step of the way my eyes opened as did my heart, until everything melted into the same thing.

You don’t choose wholeness.

You arrive at wholeness. It is a place not a thought or belief. It is a tangible frequency of frequencies.

It is where and when everything comes together, no longer separate.

It is when we, as human beings, become greater than the sum of our parts.

Wholeness is our natural state, and seems to be rare in this ‘techno-modern-superficial-separation-believing’ society.

I am forever grateful that illness came into my life to show me the way home. And I am grateful to my past self to have the wisdom to hear the call to go on the journey of healing, even if it was scary, lonely, mysterious and long.

Sometimes the longest journeys are the best.”

My advice is to take the journey. However the invitation comes, its always there. Be brave, be vulnerable, be open, step into the unknown. The benefits are incalculable. You don’t have to completely turn away from medical systems, you simply have to become your own authority, your own guru, your own advocate. Its about inner discernment as much as anything.

When you find out who you really are, through being very honest with yourself, it changes everything.

The Need To Heal Old Wounds

From my personal experience, my research and coaching lots of clients I really have concluded this one simple yet profound truth:

When we deny old emotions and/or present difficult feelings we put an increased stress on our body, on our nervous system, immune system, and important organs like heart and thyroid, and our brain. Whether that actually ’causes’ illness or not is academic, because the bottom line is it really doesn’t help.

My holistic principle is to understand that which puts extra tax and burden on a delicate and finely balanced system (the human organism) is ultimately destructive, and will assist in early degradation of healthy life. As we age it gets harder and harder to bounce back and regenerate. Which means that as we get older we must get wiser and get MORE relaxed and more FREE of old burdens. Old burdens will rigidify us physically, mentally and spiritually unless we consciously release them. They might even kill us.

This point is not as nebulous or subtle as you may think. The river is meant to flow. If it doesn’t flow it stagnates. If it stagnates it becomes toxic and allows disease to happen. It is exactly the same with us. Energy is meant to flow through us. Old emotions and toxic thoughts impede this flow and become somehow ‘trapped’ in our cellular body. The same stagnation can happen. 

Thus detoxification is useful on the physical level AND the emotional energetic level. This proposition might annoy some people and even be dismissed as new age but I have experienced it and see it everywhere, and it is a self evident truth.

In my own healing journey, healing a huge auto immune condition (inflammatory bowel disease) it really wasn’t long in my detoxification process that I was propelled into the fury and powerful world of my pent up, hot, acidic and generally volatile emotions, the ones that I had buried and denied for years and years since the traumatic break up of my parents when I was 16 years old. I held on to the trauma for decades but could never access the pain and therefore never receive any healing. Make no mistake, trauma in the body, just because its not present in everyday experience, is powerful and dangerous. It’s not inert, meaning it doesn’t just sit there in a neutral state doing nothing. 

No, it has a negative power. It influences decisions, it can drive addictions and lifestyle choices. It ramps up stress response into hot stuff like rage or scary stuff like fear and anxiety. It may play a huge part in depression. It creates havoc with the nervous system and immune system, both of which have a DIRECT effect on health. It is known, for example, that stress has a direct impact on the gut micro biome, reducing healthy gut flora and allowing the ‘bad guys’ to gain the upper hand.

I truly believe that my healing had plateaued until I dived into my emotions. And then it catapulted into an increase in healing. It’s not the magic bullet but it is incredibly powerful.

I would go as far as to say you can’t truly heal without it.

If you are on the same journey that took me over 10 years, please listen. Do the emotional stuff. Find a way, find a resource. Follow your instinct for what your body wants, listen to your own inner voice, and get guidance from others who know this territory, and then fully embrace your healing. Even when it is difficult because dragging old stuff up hurts, still press on. It is far better that you meet the pain, and it hurts, and you release it, than you don’t meet it and it kills you.

I wish you love and blessings on your path.

Thanks for reading!

 

Being ‘Triggered’ and How It Affects Health

One of the links between the body and the emotions, between emotions and health and illness is the nervous system and ‘triggers.’

Most people these days have heard the term ‘triggered.’ It’s a term used to describe a largely unconscious response mechanism activated by some event, or thought or experience. Something ‘triggers’ you and in a flash you have gone to a different place within yourself and might suddenly feel emotional rage, stress, anxiety, or any negative sensation. It is rather like, and can be associated with PTSD. There is an element of PTSD in it.

Something triggers you and bam! You are jettisoned into a different reality and you lose perspective and balance and might become irrational and emotional, or feel like a trapped child, or anything. Triggers are individual because they come from our individual experience. In most people they have their roots in childhood trauma and stress, situations of powerlessness and lost innocence, experiences that have never been processed but been ‘lived with’ or even denied. They are extremely powerful and should never be underestimated.

But here is the point. The triggers are not just in emotions but in the body, held within the nervous system. These triggers activate the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism and have the power to instantly release cortisol and adrenalin, necessary for survival in the face of great danger but destructive in times of peace.

So the more you get triggered, the more the nervous system is activated, until, left unchecked and unacknowledged, it starts to create chronic patterns that easily run down the adrenal gland, and contribute to thyroid degradation and immune system overload. The nervous system is fundamental to health, and a huge contributor to illness. Thus emotional life is hard wired to body health.

For true health to be realized these triggers have to be fully met and understood, and at some point they must be released from their stranglehold over the organism. This process of moving beyond the triggers is one of the great liberators I have seen in many people, and in itself can cause a cascade of transformation that is profound.

I have also seen the damage triggers create when left un investigated. They can run rampant and cause chaos. And the worst thing is they will almost definitely cause illness.