Ever recognized the body as your own healer?
Ever had a moment that changed the course of your life?
Certain life events can be more stressful and intense than others.
Also, some can be an opportunity for deeper healing than others.
One that most clearly awakened my soul was the journey to conceive a child. What already seemed like a mountain to hike, became more challenging with a diagnosis that felt insurmountable and left me hopeless.
On this long journey, and without much success there was a point when I could no longer figure the whys, I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me when tests kept coming back as normal. On a deeper analysis, I was diagnosed with a high titer of thyroid antibodies, which indicated my body was attacking a healthy thyroid. This suggested a condition called autoimmunity. Although not proven to, it was potentially marked the cause of my earlier miscarriages and inability to conceive or sustain a pregnancy. On the day I received the test results, it felt like my whole world had collapsed around me and a lifelong dream of having a child felt even further away and nearly impossible.
Autoimmunity, in short is viewed as a misdirected immune response that has lost discernment between a foreign body and that of the body’s own. Individuals affected display higher levels of inflammation than normal and can begin to feel a systemic loss of well-being on all levels.
An autoimmune diagnosis can often seem like a downward spiral to a potential road of loss and helplessness over our own body systems and eventually increase susceptibility to a spectrum of disorders and dis-ease.
This circumstance also brought me at another crossroad.
Without undermining the stress and the emotions or even the eventual prognosis, can I radically shift perspective? Could this be an opportunity for deeper healing?
While this can be true to any dis-ease in the body, I would like to share how an autoimmune diagnosis became my biggest portal for healing and transformation.
It all felt unfair, wasn’t the easiest day of my life, the emotions were overwhelming, and it felt better to just end it all at once. But something occurred whilst I was deep in my emotions, I felt the need to ask my body why it was fighting against its own and was there anything I could do. To my surprise, the body answered me back!
I heard a question from within, a mere whisper – Can you begin to love yourself truly?
The words were quite triggering because I was already doing everything in my wake to become pregnant. The numerous fertility diets, supplements, and everything in between, was this not enough love for my body? Once the emotions settled, I felt a sense of peace, I was onto something. Those words had a deeper meaning and I felt curious. I had not spoken to my body this way before, let alone receive an answer. I wondered if this was true or my over worked imagination playing, but it did not matter. I had nothing to lose.
It wasn’t an easy path to start with, to love myself was still steeped in a deep-rooted belief system that it was selfish and self-centered to put my needs first, to be able to say NO, to draw healthy boundaries or even take time for myself without feeling guilty. The belief that others outside of me were responsible for my health, my happiness and to even run my life was one that was really hard to flip.
But one step led to another, my body served as a compass.
I realized that my healing was unique to me, and I did not fit into a one-size prescription or practice. At times, kindness and self-compassion was all that I could offer myself. I began to seek practitioners who could really hear me and understand what my body needed to heal. I experienced holistic modalities that supported the body and reduced inflammation in a more natural and non-invasive manner.
Instead of coping I began to heal, inside – out.
Chronic inflammation is often the fight we have inside the body that which we cannot or feel helpless to fight on the outside. It is vital to provide a safe, trustful space for the body, to resolve the inner conflict we experience in order to reduce the outer physical symptoms. We are not just physical bodies, the energetic and spiritual is also interwoven into our field and shifting all of it is a process and takes time. At times easier and at others, spiraling downward and upward. But nobody promised healing and restorative spiritual paths were linear!
Looking back, I now understand this was truly a journey of Self-discovery and more importantly a path to love myself to my own empowered, authentic Self. I learnt how to gradually unwind from old limiting beliefs, and created a greater space for my own body, mind, and spirit. It did not mean the diagnosis went away or I successfully conceived a child, what went away was the power the diagnosis held over my health, well-being, and my fertility. I was in a better space to look at what worked for me to bring the body and mind back into balance. I felt empowered from within.
Embarking on a Self-Love path may or may not involve beauty treatments or shopping sprees, but it most certainly involves moving out of comfort zones, sometimes into unchartered spaces of your own heart to heal and reclaim lost pieces, making peace with your inner dragons, re-parenting the inner child, having healthy boundaries and also coming face-to-face with your enormous capacity to heal and love, to realize that you are Love itself in form.
What felt like the end of a road, became an opening for LOVE.