Is Your Health a Matter of Choice?

Some of the choices are obvious. You can close the curtains, open the closet, eat spinach, live in the city or sleep with chickens. Some are not so obvious. Why do you like the color blue? Why are you attracted to red-haired women? Why do you like being by the ocean? 

When it comes to your health, which is it? Is the choice obvious or obscure? How do you know what your choices are? How do you choose something, the right thing, the timely thing, when things are always changing?

Your health is like the weather. Both are relationships between many elements in constant motion. Fortunately, a relationship, is something that you can enter, something you can participate in. What does it mean to enter a relationship with your health?  It means you are willing to check inside, to see how you feel no matter the "weather." When it is sunny, you might say, I'd rather sit inside. On a rainy day, you might say, I'd rather take a walk. And even if it is cold or you are tired, you might honor your feelings by dressing up warmly, wearing a hat and heading out. A relationship means you show up, check in, and decide on the spot how you wish to participate on any given day. 

No matter what the weather, inside or out, only you know what is happening inside you! I’m not saying you know the information, the numbers, the statistics, the lab values. No, I’m saying you know how you feel. You may not have a word for how you feel, you may not have ever felt this way before, but still the knowing is there. You have feelings for a reason, even if they are messy, inconvenient and not good with words. Your knowing, your wisdom comes through your feelings, your experience and insight that is unique to you and cannot be known by any other person.  

When it comes to your health, you can’t afford not to know what your feelings are. And you can’t afford not be the one to choose. Your health is powered by your choice! You don’t choose the weather and most likely you don’t choose illness when it happens to you, but, that doesn’t mean you don’t have choices. When you don’t feel well, it is so easy to wish for someone else to make choices for you, easy to think that if someone else makes all the decisions you will feel better. We all want to feel well and we want to know how to make that happen.   

Change happens. Virtually unstoppable, really. Yet, if we test the prevailing winds, feel the weather so to speak, we can know what is happening for us. Even when we find ourselves in a situation that seems over our heads, something we know nothing about, our bodies can tell us where our choices lie. Let others make the chicken soup, drive you to the doctor and rub your feet. But save the choices for you and your body. You are the only one living in your body and will be the only one having to live with whatever choice you make. 

No matter what the choices are, the BEST medicine will always be the medicine YOU choose. On finding the gap where those choices lie next week…

Sickness is NOT a Pathology!

By this I mean that it is normal to be sick.  It is something bodies do.  Sometimes you’d think being sick was a sin.  You are on the couch, down for the count, and you are thinking “I should be at work.”, “why am I so useless?”  or “what did I do to deserve this?”  In a culture of constant work, constant contact, constant availability by phone, tablet or computer, we are left with the sense that if we aren’t doing something, there is something wrong.  

Pathology is something abnormal, something doing or being something that it isn’t meant to be.  But bodies, believe it or not, were meant to be sick.  Sickness is really another way of saying  “change is happening.”  Being sick is a way our bodies allow new ideas to take shape, a way that new “roads” can be built, old ones dismantled.  Renovation, repair, and even destruction of our cells is absolutely necessary for vibrant health.  

When we are sick, our bodies put the “doing” out there in the world on hold, so they can focus on what needs doing inside.  Your body systems conspire to slow you down, keep you sleepy and basically prevent you from doing much in the usual sense.  For good cause. The cause, the need, even the demand for  change on the inside.  You wouldn’t try to change the tire on your car while it was moving, would you?  Why then, would you try to change seasons, jobs, relationships, or even hairstyles, without slowing down, let alone stopping?

What if we could accept that sometimes sickness is a necessary, even important, part of being human? What if we could use our sickness as a way to regain choice, to empower our health with the knowing that our bodies can and do absolutely know how to heal when given the right conditions.  Health, then, is NOT the absence of disease or sickness, but rather the presence of each of us in our own bodies, in our own knowing, in each moment.  

I guess this could sound like a tall order, but the truth is, you are already doing it much of the time.  You already know how to be a body.  You already know how to listen to the signals; hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain.  The question is do you? And the even bigger question is when you hear the body calling do you know what your choices are?  

  More on the matter of choice next week...