Everyone gets sick. Why are we ashamed of it?
My body and health are the most precious things I will ever have in this lifetime. They deserve to be properly tended to, and I am more than worthy of taking the space to nourish them.
One of the fun things about being an intuitive with hearing and seeing gifts is being able to advise others on their journeys. Recently, a dear friend asked me why the cold she had suffered for nearly a month wouldn’t go away. I knew that she needed to take a break from work and her social schedule to truly rest. When I tuned in to receive more, she was prescribed 3-4 days of laying down and doing nothing but resting. I heard that she was concocting many mental reasons why she couldn’t take that time, but that’s all they are: mental reasons.
The other thing that came through was that she needed to increase her water intake ten-fold. Admittedly, it felt odd to me because she is one of the most hydrated people I know, but she confirmed she had barely been drinking water because it felt like her body couldn’t take it in. What came through next was the message that her body was taking in too many energies that she should be walking away from.
Well, the mental reasons have won out so far, as they so often do for many of us when we are sick and have “prior commitments.” She told me she was blocking herself from her goals of practicing true self care. When I asked her why, she said, “fear and ego.”
The fear piece is what created the urge to put pen to paper, so to speak, because what she said next is the same fear that I have had in the nearly two decades of dealing with one weird “chronic” illness after another:
“I’m afraid after all of this work that I’m not going to get what I want and my body is still going to have issues.”
Preach, amiright?!
This is a fear I know all too well, and one that has had me bowing to my mental reasons for not taking time off when I’ve needed it. I’d ignore my body’s cry for extended leave and periods of rest, instead catering to the fear of how I would be perceived. I worried I would be seen as incapable, unreliable, or even as a liar if I did what I really needed to do to help my body heal.
Instead I would dedicate mornings, nights, weekends – OK, and even short naps during the day as needed – to rest and self care practices in an effort to nudge my body back into an ideal state of wellness.
It is at this point that I must quote Danielle LaPorte from her book, White Hot Truth.
“Settling for crumbs doesn’t keep you fed - it keeps you starving.”
Even cognitively understanding the wisdom in this, my mind would argue and rebel. If what I had been dealing with was indeed chronic, didn’t I need to learn how to take care of myself, work, and live my life? What good would taking an extended period of rest, like one available to me through short-term medical leave, really do? I posited that I would have to take leave once a year just to get “proper rest.”
Underneath it, there is the pressure that comes with expectations of what you’ll feel like and how you’ll be when you come back to work, whether you’re out because you have the flu or because you’ve taken leave for something more serious. I personally have the perception that I am expected to take the minimum amount of time required, and to come back firing on all cylinders.
In contemplating this, I can’t help but consider that we all experience illness throughout our lives as a course of being human. Don’t we all know that no one comes back at 100% after an illness, especially if we’re so afraid to take the time we really need because of what we think our absence says about us?
I’m then brought to another thought, which is that perhaps not everyone feels as awful as, say, I do, when they get a cold, flu, or something else. Maybe not everyone needs the same amount of time or rest. I know that there is some truth to this, which then leads me to two other thoughts.
We either need to look at those who have been sick for any period of time with more visible and audible compassion, or the person who has been sick needs to change their perception of how others may or may not be viewing them. Which is to say that we need to stop telling ourselves others are viewing us negatively for having been sick and assume instead that we are being viewed with compassion.
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. We can certainly have compassion for our friends, family, and colleagues who are ill while also feeling some type of way depending on our own relationships with them.
What it really comes down to is the energy that we bring to the situation, and speaking with truthful intention. Because we are all human and we do all get sick from time to time, just like we all need to breathe, drink water, eat, eliminate, and sleep to live.
Perhaps this is experience is more challenging when you have chronic health issues, as I know that it has been for me. I’ve long managed conditions and symptoms without taking a proper break from my daily toils with the intention of getting into a good rhythm of care and healing them. There may have been an element of worthiness, because I have never perceived myself as sick enough to require taking leave. I just muddle along, shining brightly during the periods of time when the fire within me is strong, and letting myself fade into the background when I am down to coals.
The past year has given me multiple indicators in my health that this approach isn’t sufficient. When I finally received a mold toxicity diagnosis and really examined my life, I knew I had to make a drastic change. Using what energy I had to work and otherwise spending my time on the couch or in bed is not living. Besides, I was finally diagnosed with something that had a clear treatment plan and timeline. I could not longer shrug my symptoms off as “just how I have to live my life.”
I’m not sure that this is the antidote to my worthiness issue, but it did give me a mental construct and a logical reason to consider time off. Mold toxicity can be neatly written into medical leave forms, after all.
I am certainly struggling with my ego and my mental projections of how others will perceive me, especially given my recent move into a brand new role with a cast of characters who don’t yet know me or what I am capable of.
When I consider the bigger picture I know that this is a blip on the radar. Time moves fast, and my body and health are the most precious things I will ever have in this lifetime. They deserve to be properly tended to, and I am more than worthy of taking the space to nourish them.
By the way: so are you.
