Today’s entry is a very personal one for me and it’s something I feel very compelled to write about given how much it’s been surfacing as of late. It’s about trusting in my body’s ability to heal itself. In other words, it’s about trusting in a part of me that I’ve never, ever, been good with for most of my life.
That all began when I was a kid. Take for example whenever I got something as simple as a cough. When I did, I’d always quickly be administered some type of medicine by my mother to handle it. The same would hold true for any other type of ailment that ever came up, as there was always some external analgesic she had to deal with it. But when all those over-the-counter remedies were exhausted and whatever the symptoms I was dealing with didn’t get better, I’d swiftly be taken to the doctors where I’d be given some type of prescription, most often being penicillin. In fact, my younger years were usually filled with all sorts of medicines to deal with various things that were perceived wrong with my mind and body. Never did I go through any pain or ailment by just trusting that my body could or would fix them on its own.
As I grew older and graduated from college, this pattern grew worse, especially as my life got pretty complicated when I came out of the closet and then endured my father’s suicide. I initially tried the medicine route to deal with all of it, because that’s all I knew, but it really didn’t work out very well. I got more complications from most of the medicines I took versus any tangible benefits and my life seemed to filled within nothing but serious side effects from them all. That’s when I began a holistic path, where for more than a decade, I relied solely on homeopathic and herbal remedies, along with everything from chiropractors to acupuncturists. I definitely received benefit from this course of treatment during all those years, yet the fact was I was still completely reliant on everyone and everything else, except myself for my health and healing.
A few years ago though my prayers and meditations began to lead me away from all this external healing reliance. Instead, I started going through all my health issues without any outside help and it’s been extremely difficult ever since. This has been such a challenge for me because on some level, I believe that my hypochondria originated out of all this external reliance. As I said already, the programming I created in my life from a little boy to just a few years ago was that whenever I’d feel sick, there was someone or something out there that I needed to find to help fix me.
Thus trying to trust in my own body’s natural ability to heal itself at the ripe age of 43 has been the most daunting task I’ve ever had to face in life. Every single day my fear factor has been through the roof with all the aches, pains, bumps, bruises, cuts, blemishes, etc. that surface. I know this might seem hard to understand for the majority of people reading this. But maybe if you can picture your most incredible phobia in life for moment, you might grasp how this is for me.
How do you deal with your phobia when it’s suddenly in front of you? If it’s of spiders or mice say for example and you see one close by, do you scream and run away or smash them as quick as possible? If it’s of heights, do you avoid going up ladders or ascending tall structures or do you just never look down when you are way up high? In my case, the only way I’ve ever dealt with my phobia, of me not trusting my own body to fix its health issues when they arise, is to immediately run to those doctors, holistic practitioners, and take those prescriptions or herbs.
But now I’m not doing that anymore. Now I’m allowing all these pains and ailments to surface, most of which seem to be things I’ve already dealt with in life before, which most likely just got suppressed through any one of those external means. And as they surface I glare at them with a racing heart and am doing my best to sit through all that uncomfortability without running to anyone or anything to take it away.
This truly is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do in life and on most days, I feel like my mind is screaming at me and telling me I’m falling apart. In all honesty, it’s downright scary going through this for me because I continue to wonder at times if I’m going to land in a hospital or a psych ward by staying on this path.
All in all though, the bottom line is that I want to overcome this fear and I am doing everything I can to get there. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being dependent on doctors and practitioners and medicine and remedies to fix me. So I’m relying quite heavily lately on God and the Spirit within me to help me overcome this by living one day at a time and continuing to face the biggest fear I’ve ever had to face in life. And I remain faithful in God that in doing so I will conquer this fear once and for all and gain something I’ve never had before in life, that being some trust in a part of myself that got lost long ago…
Peace, love, light, and joy
Andrew Arthur Dawson