With every illness comes an emotional and energetic root cause.
I’m often challenged on this statement because there is typically also a physical root cause, and while that cannot be discounted, what interests me is what makes us susceptible to that root cause in that moment.
For example: why was I not affected by my tick bite until years after the fact? Why had my Lyme Disease lay dormant until now?
The answer is always: emotions and energetics.
You can read the following from an instructive perspective or a preventative perspective, but know this - it is true and necessary for all of us to understand.
Just like how under each emotional trigger lies the root cause of that trigger (a lived or inherited experience, belief or behavior), under each dis-ease lies an emotional and energetic trigger.
So the work in both cases becomes discovering the trigger underneath the trigger.
The formula for getting to the root of this root cause is similar to the formula for working with trauma:
Recognize
Reorganize
Release
Connection
Louise Hay outlines a lot of the emotional/energetic correlates of illness in “Heal Your Body”.
When I first discovered that I had Chronic Lyme, I was knees deep in a story of abandonment, so it was a relief to learn that the emotional undercurrent of Lyme is abandonment. I also had high numbers for EBV and three different kinds of walking pneumonia, which are correlated with stress and grief, respectively.
It made sense.
Knowing that there was a reason I was feeling the way I was feeling (emotionally) helped me relax around those feelings, but recognizing that I would have to deal with what was underneath those feelings in order to heal what I was feeling (physically) felt like…a project.
So here’s what I did:
Recognize: this is usually the trickiest part. Recognition requires differentiation, which means you first have to understand you are triggered, and then have a moment of clarity that the trigger itself might not be “true”.
Meaning, there’s a curiosity about the genesis and the driving factors of whatever is triggering you.
The moment of differentiation typically comes from noticing that the feeling you feel in your body is familiar, even if the circumstance you’re reacting to is unique.
Reorganize: I devotedly use the trigger prompts from my book to look at and understand the story I was telling myself, its origins and how it was showing up in my present life. Then to create a new framework for that story, and to choose different actions when the old stuff arises.
This doesn’t mean the trigger or wound goes away, but it does mean you’re training your brain to think differently each time it pops up.
Release: This can be done in a lot of ways. Meditation, somatics, dance, exercise, yoga, breathwork, embodiment practices, massage, sauna, etc.
Basically you want to move your body to move your experience.
But if you’re unwell and unable to move, meditation, breathwork, restorative yoga, or - simply - visualization.
Connection: you can share your experience, your new story, or just be in the company of others. Triggers and trauma take root not because of the aggravating event itself, but because there was no safe space to process what happened. Welcoming community into your experience allows for co-regulation and repatterning of the underlying wound.
Will this process immediately affect your physical condition? Maybe.
Will it immediately affect your emotional experience? Absolutely.
Will doing this make your triggers will go away forever? No, but your relationship with them will change, and they won’t have the same power over you that they used to.
Does that mean your physical condition will begin to evolve away from its current experience? 100%.
There is no true, sustainable healing unless emotional and energetic elements are addressed.
And it is a lifetime process for all of us.
The less we work through the things that have happened to us and the stories we hold, the more vulnerability we carry in our bodies.
The more we work through the things that have happened to us and the stories we hold, the more freedom we have to live unencumbered and beautiful lives.
It’s worth getting ahead of before you have a serious crisis of health, but if you’re already inside one, this is an inescapable part of your way out.
I will share a personal anecdote about this work:
That story of abandonment I was in the trenches with…I worked these steps A LOT, and forced myself to sit on my hands and not blow up the situation I was reacting to.
Wound after wound began to expose itself, and each time I tended to those wounds in a way that gave me more and more space from them.
I started to see how the story I was reacting to was not mine, and not actually supported by events that have happened to me, but rather to people in my ancestral line.
Which is to say: a dominating storyline that has impacted every single one of my relationships was something that had nothing to do with me or my life, but was inherited and imprinted in my nervous system.
So I got to release it.
Through this work and a cultivated patience, I changed my perspective and my reflexive behaviors, and allowed for a different, AMAZING experience of the same situation to emerge.
And that gave way for my nervous system to start regulating around what is true for me instead of what was true for someone many generations ago.
Because that multi-generational “curse” did continue to show up in my life, and in the lives of people in my family, but because we were in so much fear of it happening that we created the perfect conditions for it to occur.
So the pain carried forward was finally released through this work.
And, almost immediately, my seemingly intractable breathing issues began to resolve.
They didn't go away completely - I still struggle at times - but they finally started to relent.
And the more work I do in this regard, the more they improve.
If you are looking for more tips and ideas on how to move your mind, body, heart and nervous system towards a healthy state, you will find so many in my book The Medicinal Wisdom Guide to Healing Lyme & Chronic Illness.
The title of the book is deceiving, as it's really a book on healing in general…I go deep into the psycho-spiritual aspects (which I personally think is the most important part), and I also offer a ton of practical advice and resources.
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