I've been contemplating this message for quite some time. Many times from many spiritual teachers and guru's, I have heard or read the message that there are really only two emotions, fear or love, and we are never victims. This has been a difficult concept to grasp in light of the tradegies both personal and globally that we live through each day. How can this be, only two emotions, fear or love? Well, I still don't have the answers but I feel like I understand little bits and pieces around the edges of what I perceive to be a huge question. Sort of like trying to put together a 10,000 piece puzzle that you don't have the container it came in but you have started to put enough of the pieces together that you think maybe it is starting to look like something understandable.
Here are some of the pieces that have given me a frame of reference for trying to understand this bigger picture. I understand this concept better when I apply it to our bodies and how our bodies work. Specifically pain and disease processes in our bodies. For years, I have worked with people that have chronic pain and idiopathic (unexplained) dis-ease. It never made sense to me, that as part of a medical community, we couldn't figure out with laboratory data, x-rays, CT scans and MRI's and literally every test known to man what is causing chronic symptoms. Idiopathic is what we in the medical field name things when we cannot find a cause by ordinary means. So, I started applying this principle of there really only being two states, love or fear to these situations.
In many of these situations, when you start asking questions about emotional and spiritual health, the physical symptoms start making more sense. For instance, in working with a woman who was diagnosed with Idiopathic Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT) after having every heart test known and despite being on the "best" medication to control the symptoms and was still having symptoms, the underlying cause of all of this was deep seated fear. She was afraid of being alone so she was staying in a relationship that she wasn't happy in but was convinced that it was better than being alone. Her symptoms started when they started looking at buying a house together. Interestingly, when she acknowledged these emotions and worked through her fears, the symptoms resolved and she was able to stop the medication and has not had symptoms since.
Another example of this theory at work is a gentleman that I was working with who had chronic back pain. His doctor prescribed heavy duty narcotics and muscle relaxants to try to at least help reduce his pain so that he could "function" throughout the day. Though now he says he doesn't know how well he was "functioning" since he felt like he was in a fog all day every day. His pain was all lumbar low back pain to the point that it was excruciating to walk and he felt his feet were numb and tingling every moment of every day with no relief in site. He had CT scans and MRI's that showed degenerative disk disease and was recommended back surgery. We worked through several sessions with bodywork and then started talking about his emotional and spiritual health. Long story short, he had been verbally abused all through his childhood by both of his parents leaving him feeling that he could never do anything right and if he had just been a good enough child his parents would have been happy. Into adulthood, he continued with relationships that also reinforced this feeling of never being good enough for the other person in the relationship. He had so much guilt and insecurity tied up at his core that he could barely move anymore. When he acknowledged these deep emotions of how fearful he truly was and was able to work through that his parents unhappiness was not his fault, his pain started decreasing. At first, he noticed that he didn't need to take the pain pills every 4-6 hours throughout the day. Within a short period of time, he weaned himself completely off the pills and has been pain free since.
There are many more examples of people with many other symptoms that I could go on and on with here but the point is that symptoms and dis-ease changed when the emotional and spiritual health was acknowledged. So what really changed for these people? Let me first say that things changed over a period of time and with some deep work with body, mind and spirit. By working with the deep seated emotional pain that was present inside, the external physical manifestations of the pain started to resolve. These people acknowledged their fears and realized that not only did they no longer need to be a victim of their past but they didn't need to feel like they were a victim of their body either.
How many times when our body is not functioning the way that we want it to or think that we it should do we feel like a victim of our own body? We think oh my gosh, I try to eat right and exercise regularly and look at this, my body is not behaving or reacting the way I want it to. Or maybe something more dramatic has happened like a heart attack or a stroke. It is very easy to fall into being a victim of what ever is going on with our body. The key is to look within and find what is causing us to take up that victim mentality. Only then can we change our thought process and start looking for the opportunity that our physical symptoms are presenting to us. We can change from being fearful of what is happening on the physical level and look for the opportunity to allow love to empower us to overcome the physical symptoms of dis-ease.
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