Welcome Wellness

In all its forms

Another flu has come and gone through our family since our move in to the new house in December. The worst was my youngest who caught it first and then had an entirely different set of long lingering stomach flu symptoms his second go of it.

As with many physical maladies, I feel like I learned things emotionally.

Do you ever ask yourself when you are sick, “what has this illness come to teach me?” Certainly, it is an exercise that builds immunity that we can revere. But also, it can teach us something subconsciously or bring things up from the subconscious to the conscious to be examined. There were some profound lessons for me in that exploration this time.

I immediately recognized I had some grief to release and letting go to do. I think there will always be ongoing grief to process. But right off the bat, I learned that my system was too low to process that trapped grief that I felt the illness was here to help me work through. I had an option. Force myself to work through it or try to gain an elevated energetic state until I was physically ready to process it. Had I forced myself, I knew I would have been doing damage to my physical health and recovery period. My body showed me its boundary and said, “this is the line between self love and self destruction.” I found it strangely effortless in my early stages of being ill to shift to a more hopeful mindset.

That’s a lesson in itself. When I am tempted to force myself to acknowledge grief or something unhealed and face it when I am not truly ready to release or heal, I impose this unattainable burden of emotional perfection on myself. This is a form of self-harm, self-sabotage. When I try to force myself to feel hopeful when grief is imminent, this is similarly harmful.

I see many in the realms of self-help promoting this incessant chasing of inner demons and slaying of deep emotional dragons without the reverence for how far one has come, how wonderful one is, how enough I am in this current incarnation and was in previous incarnations to do everything I have done to bring me to this moment today.

Is this constant deprecation of our lesser appreciated emotional and psychological states self-help or self-harm? Does this feed the ego at some point, all this well being, or does it feed the soul?

Only one can answer this for his or herself.

But one thing is for sure, healing doesn’t have to come through force. Maybe, it shouldn’t. It will find you when the time is right and lift you to a place where it is a gratifying experience rather than a wasteful one.

Sometimes, the ultimate lesson is patience and in that, self appreciation.