If you’ve been grappling with a chronic health issue in spite of your best effort at living a healthy lifestyle, it can be so discouraging. You've been eating reasonably healthy, exercising, stretching, taking your supplements, but your back pain, nausea, skin rash, or asthma, just won’t go away. You may be thinking you need to do more. Well, consider the solution might not be to do more, but rather to look elsewhere for the source of your pain.
By the time I turned 20…
…I had been dealing with recurring digestive issues, chest pain, migraines and skin inflammation. Many doctor’s visits, blood tests, saliva tests, breath tests, ultrasounds and MRI’s later, the diagnosis would invariably be that I was A-OK, which was puzzling, considering I wasn’t feeling well at all. So I experimented with dietary changes, detox, herbal supplements, creams, teas and tinctures, hot baths, saunas, chiropractic adjustments, you name it, yet the issues kept recurring. Increasingly, I began to sense that the cause of my physical ills might not actually be in my physical body. Hence began my lifelong passion about the mind-body-soul connection, holistic and integrative healing approaches.
Deeper Than The Physical
What I learned later in my studies of Yoga and Ayurveda, was that food, herbs, topical substances, hot baths, saunas, chiropractic adjustments, exercise, are all primarily physical means of healing, acting primarily on the physical body (note, primarily). I am not suggesting that a wholesome diet and exercise are not helpful. They are essential pillars to good health. But if you’ve attempted to get better through some of those physical means, and it’s only helped so much, it could be a clue that the root cause of your ailment does not reside in your physical body. Additionally, if you have no conscious awareness of what’s causing your chronic discomfort, that, in my experience, is another invitation to look deeper. Indeed, Ayurveda would argue that when a physical problem appears in the body, and becomes chronic, it has likely been years in the making, "behind the scenes", in the subtle body, and is the final expression of a deeper energetic imbalance.
“The body never lies [...]The body says things about one’s emotional history and deepest feelings. [...] For those who can see and understand, the body speaks clearly, revealing character and a person’s way of being in the world. It reveals past trauma and present personality, feelings expressed and feelings unexpressed. ”
Really?
If you’re skeptical of this hypothesis, it’s normal. The western mind, biased as it is towards using logic more than intuition, will often dismiss the possibility that a physical ailment could have originated in the unseen world of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. Eastern traditions are certainly better suited at explaining the inter-connectedness of our many layers. Yoga, specifically, offers a blueprint of the mind-body-soul anatomy in the form of the five koshas, or sheaths. Perhaps this paradigm will help you better understand your multi-dimensional self, and broaden your healing horizon. More on that in part 2.
Cheers,
Sylvie
(ps. on June 16th, I will be teaching Ayurveda 101: Daily Self-Care for Good Health & Longevity at the JCC, register online here).