Why acceptance is the key to healing

If you're like most people, as soon as you get sick in someway, you usually instantly react by trying to find a way to get rid of the problem.

If you start sneezing, you'll reach for the cold medication; if your throat hurts, you break out the lozenges; if your head starts to ache, you make a bee-line for the Tylenol bottle, and so on, and so forth.

This is human nature, and everyone has these tendencies. But here's the thing: the more you try to fight against your symptoms and 'take control' of your illness, the worse you can often make it.

Why?




Because that illness is not a random event or result of some bad luck, it's been sent to you by God, for a very good reason. Maybe, He sent you the cold to get you to slow down a bit and stop spending so much time at work? Maybe, your throat hurts so you'll start to pay attention to how much time you're spending chatting on your phone, or to what you're actually saying. When it hurts to speak, you suddenly realize how much of what you say is sort of pointless and trivial (at best…)

Point is, there's a message hidden in every single symptom and illness you have. When you shoot the mailman on arrival by zapping it with an aspirin, you missed the whole point.

But God doesn't give up, so what does He do? He sends a bigger, brawnier mailman the next time round, to give you the same message. The cold might morph into pneumonia; the throat infection becomes severe laryngitis; the headache becomes paralysing migraines.

Sure, you can go out and find the next biggest medical weapon to 'fight' against these new symptoms - there's nothing intrinsically wrong with taking care of yourself in that way - but before you do, just first make an effort to find out: what is the message?

When you start to approach your illnesses in this way, it becomes much easier to accept your unpleasant symptoms, and deal with them with more equanimity.

Let's take the cold example: Now that you realized that God wants you to take it easy, and that you've been overdoing it, accepting that underlying message means that you're going to be much calmer about the amount of time you're spending in bed, recuperating.

You got the message, and you're giving your body and soul the time and space it needs to really heal and recuperate. That's how accepting your minor illnesses without automatically trying to medicate them away can truly be the key to healing at every level of your being.

---