If you have a chronic illness such as arthritis, obesity, diabetes etc. This article will help you to understand a few things about your chronic health problem. First, it’s important to realize that continuing your present style of ordinary behaviors will cause your illness to grow steadily worse. For example, imagine that your problem were chronic back pain. Because of the pain you can no longer sit, stand, bend and twist the way you are accustomed to. The ways you are accustomed to moving aggravate your condition. If you continue to attempt engaging in your accustomed patterns of movement, your back will grow worse. You cannot do what other people do who do not have chronic back pain.
In order to correct it, you will probably need to rest from any movement during some periods of time. You might even have to stay in bed for several days and/or take breaks during the day to lay down and rest your back.
The same is true of metabolic and nutritional injuries. Metabolic injuries are central to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and, in fact, most chronic degenerative diseases. If you persist in your accustomed ways of eating, you will grow worse. Further, even if you improve your flagrant offenses so that you are eating in a manner that would sustain good health in a normal person, this way of eating will injure you. You are not a normal person. You are sick, and you must care for yourself accordingly.
If you do not understand this you set yourself up for disappointment and failure. You will feel that you are making good efforts and yet you make no progress. You may think that there is just something wrong with you, that you are uniquely flawed. It is not so. Just as a person with an injured back will never heal their back if they continue to lift amounts that a normal person lifts. So you will need to eat in ways that do not continue to re injure your metabolic injury.
Your body will require that you live in a much more careful manner than healthy people, because even if you change your ways so that you eat, exert and rest much better than you did before, you will still continue to grow worse. You are in metabolic/energetic debt. This is very similar to being in financial debt. It will not be sufficient for you to merely balance your income and expenditures. You must pay off both your debts as well as the interest payments. To do this you must live in a more caring fashion than you will need to once you become well.
You are self-healing. And your illness is a an intelligent, benevolent process. Your body knows exactly how to get well and she will teach you exactly what you must do in order for her to do this. My skill is that I understand very well the language of the body and I help you to understand what she is asking of you. Living in alignment with our body’s needs brings about not only physical and metabolic corrections in the body, but also corrections in our appetites and cravings, in our relationships and in our very character. We become stronger. Life teaches us a lesson that we will not easily forget. We are Healed of living in non-sustainable, debt-accumulating ways.
This is difficult work. We would not ever have the strength or willingness to do it, except life gives us no other choice. As we persist in taking better care of ourselves, we grow accustomed to a way of living and eating that at first probably seemed too difficult to us. It makes the process enormously easier when you have a teacher who has walked this path himself. Who can offer you guidance, inspiration and encouragement.
We want to be able to return to our old accustomed habitual ways of eating. Often my clients ask “Will I ever be able to eat ‘blank’ again? I respond that it is like little kids who want to play with matches. At the stage where matches are highly fascinating and alluring to them the answer is “No.” When they mature a little so that the allure has declined, then we can leave matches out in the house and know that the children will not abuse them. We know that they know the right use of matches and can be trusted with them.
The same principle applies in your relationship with your body. She knows when you are trustworthy. When your body is healed of her chronic illness, her metabolic debt, you will know because you will have gotten over your compulsive need to eat whatever those things are that you thought you could not live without. Your desires for what harms you will be healed, and, simultaneously, your body will be healed. You will be able to eat as you please, however you will be free of the compulsion to eat what is harmful to you. You may at times choose to do so, but you will not be tormented by the desires to do so. You will eat by choice not compulsion.
This has some special implications for overweight persons because initially you will find that you improve your eating significantly and yet you continue to gain weight. I encourage you to understand that your body is in a negative cycle. Your levels of insulin and other hormones, as well as the receptor sites on your cell membranes and many other metabolic functions, are out of balance. They function incorrectly. Being fat causes more fatness. Your body has become well trained at storing fat. If you are seriously overweight or if you are seriously ill in any manner, you must free yourself of unrealistic expectations. Your body will continue to grow more sick even though you make some significant changes. This does not mean that these changes are not useful or necessary; in fact, they are both useful and necessary. They are simply insufficient.
Do not set your expectations too low. Get yourself geared up for a program that will require your absolute best. What you are attempting to do may appear impossible to who you know yourself to be. You may have never in your history been able to make such changes. This is how almost everyone feels. However I assure you that what you desire to do is supremely possible,… even inevitable.
To accomplish the healing that you desire will require that you draw on power greater than you think you possess. In very practical, non-airy-fairy terms, you are going to have to find that power. You must want your health passionately. You must adapt to the requirements of health. There is no other way. None!
To make such changes, you are perfectly supported. These changes — the work of mastering yourself — is without doubt the most difficult work in the world. There is only one thing more difficult, and that is to not do this work, to remain sick and continue suffering. If you think deeply on this, you will see that you have no choice. You will also see that your illness is, in fact, a gift, perfectly and personally designed for you. The processes of illness are under the control of health. Health uses illness to restore you to health. The process is not easy, but you have no choice. The more you give yourself to pondering this truth, the more you will find the courage to do the work that will unfailingly bring you the body you desire.
You are innately endowed with the ability to govern your actions wisely. The challenges you face in your quest to regain your health are most ordinary. What health requires of you is not mysterious, nor does healing require any unusual powers. What is asked of you is simply that you perform your most ordinary activities of living, i.e. eating, moving, thinking and relating, and you imbue these activities with your own kindness and intelligence. You are completely capable of this.
Take heart, believe in yourself, believe in the goodness that is at your core. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.