Changing our Patriarchal Relationship with Illness
“ Too often we defend against our pain and the transformative process by turning our symptoms into enemies that we want to banish, suppress, or defeat. Transformation means giving up our defense structure of creating a war within ourselves — the structure that wants to prevent us from seeking out the truth of our own reality. This approach is the road less traveled; it is countercultural, and it negates our ideas of control, rationality, and fixing problems. But it allowed me to turn my depression into a path of deep healing and reflection and the source of a new life.”
-from Aging Strong: The Extraordinary Gift of a Longer Life by Bud Harris Ph.D.
I love this quote by Dr. Bud Harris.
I have felt this way about our culture’s relationship to disease, symptoms, illness and our bodies since I was in Medical school.
How many times have we heard the slogan, “WAR AGAINST CANCER” or “RELENTLESS TOGETHER,” indicating attack against the body that is sick with cancer.
These are Patriarchal ways of dealing with symptoms. The body is a responder to the environment it is living in — personal, collective, nutritional, environmental, spiritual, psychological and metaphoric, and the encouraging thing about knowing this is when we change that environment, we change the body’s response to it.
This translates as “HEALING.”
This is the heart of my work as an Internist.
I go deeper with my patients into the places that are unseen, invisible and untapped and help facilitate the re-cognition and re-orientation through becoming conscious of the roots of the symptom, be it with therapy, nutrition, lifestyle, or spiritual practice so that the clues and answers to an illness can be uncovered.
The roots of illness are always accessible but it takes exploration with the intent to learn and seek for transfromation.
Since we as physicians are taught to just skim the physical surface and palliate symptoms (and this is what is rewarded in corporate medicine as it makes pharmaceutical and hospital dollars), we lose contact with the wisdom behind the symptom — “what is the meaning, the lesson, the truth of it” that our body/psyche/Soul wants us to learn? Why is the body/psyche responding in this way?
Contemplate this reframe.
This is where I believe the heart of healing lies.
We don’t need to run/attack/destroy, but when we learn and heal the root, the symptom transforms and transmutes and we become healthy again.
This is our alignment with the laws of Nature and in our culture, we call this a ‘Miracle’.
Conventional medicine does help but the intention with how we engage it is VITALLY important, maybe even more than the medicine itself.
This is hard work and counterculture, as Dr. Harris says but we must undertake this task of reframing and shifting our personal paradigm of belief. It is our only hope for true healing.
#BudHarris #healing #integrativemedicine #reframing #medicine#Feminine #Ommani
