Sickness – A physical reality, of the Emotional Baggage We Carry!

My Experience.

Emotional Baggage! In all my years of counseling, I have never met a physically sick,  person who is without Emotional Baggage. I have great compassion for people who are sick. At various stages of my life, I have cared for them with much love. But also, with a lot of regrets. 

In life, there are neither rewards nor punishments. There are only consequences.

Sickness is the consequence of the way we live. You just repeat this to anyone, and you will see how vehemently they will deny it. To most people sickness “just happens”, or they believe they picked it up from some unhygienic place or situation or person.

Our beliefs, our emotional baggage – that is, the memories of hurts, rejection, traumas, death of a dear one, or whatever have created fear and insecurity in our lives. These eventually act on our glands, heart, organs etc. And so we fall sick.

Drop your Emotional Baggage

Among the sick persons, I have come across, there were those who were eager to get well and they were very much open to thinking out of the box. These soon learned and understood that their sickness was a result of the emotional baggage they were carrying. While taking the help of medicines and Doctors, they also worked at healing their memories, their relationships, and mending their lifestyle and food habits. (Bad lifestyles and food habits are a result of hanging on to emotional baggage.) These went into counseling, meditation, yoga, walking, exercising in general, and corrected their eating habits. They detached themselves from their emotional baggage and quickly returned to good health and happiness, no matter what their sickness.

People who often don't heal!

The other group of sick people I came across was basically made up of people who were themselves victims of society, born of abusive parents, children of broken families, or simply had had traumatic experiences, like severe accidents, loss of parents, sexual abuse, etc.  They were angry, moody, depressed, dependent, chronically sick, etc., etc. These people rarely if ever recover. They generally blame anyone and everyone, including God for their conditions. Perhaps with help, they could heal. And this is the goal of my article. They must be encouraged to introspect. They must be helped to understand that by looking at their own lives they could make new choices. 

Sickness - A Gift to complete Healing!

Sickness is like a red flag, warning you that it's time to take a look at yourself. Please! Whatever be your sickness, even if it be Cancer, or rather I’d say, particularly Cancer, be sure you can be cured. Yes, you heard me correctly. Cancer can be and is cured. Every sickness can be cured including the so-called incurable sicknesses. There is enough evidence to that effect. Choose to ask yourself; what is my sickness telling me about myself, my life. Choose to live a healthy and happy life.

Suggested Reading: 

• "The Secret Language of your Body" by Inna Segal.
• "You Can Heal Your Life" by Louise Hay

Steps to heal your life, in my next blog Post!

 

A Personal Response to Covid-19

I am a senior citizen, soon to become seventy four in a few days. Apart from that I am a diabetic since the last forty years suffering from peripheral neuropathy as well. In short, I am what is termed as a high-risk patient. Apart from that I am happy to say I neither smoke nor drink Alcohol.

Let me start from this point. I was a social drinker and a rather heavy smoker. Fortunately, it was on being diagnosed with Diabetes, that I began a process of introspection. I realized that I was damaging my internal organs. With much difficulty I stopped drinking and smoking completely. (Thank you Diabetes, you saved my life.)

Confronted with Covid-19 since the last one year and forced into isolation, I felt I was once again being gifted by life the opportunity to introspect.

The basis of a healthy Spiritual life is Conversion. 

There is only so much one can look outside for health and healing or for that matter “Happiness”, that elusive state of mind, for which we are always searching, but it always seem to remain just out of our reach.

Today, after a year of introspection, I have to confess, happiness is not outside of me, but very much a part of me, within me, an expression of me. It only needs to be uncovered. Circumstances of birth and life, always create for us a belief in conditional love. It has been no different for me. Most of us unfortunately never really get of that treadmill of our search for happiness, our search for love, “unconditional Love”. Instead, like being trapped in sinking sands, we get disappointed, hurt, frustrated angry and get more deeply sucked into bitterness and depression. This soon creates a “depression” of our all-powerful, God given Immune System. Result: we are open to every sickness and disease. And worse to Auto-immune sicknesses that attack the very immune system that is meant to protect our bodies.

In this last year of Covid isolation, I got a chance of being, so to say in a prolonged retreat of silence, prayer, reading, music and confronting myself, my beliefs, my attitudes, my relationships, and most of all my preparedness for the ultimate reality – Death.

I spent time in sincere forgiveness. Asking God for forgiveness and people for forgiveness is totally secondary. In fact it is not even necessary. Primarily I realized, I have to forgive myself. 

It’s only now that I have learned to address the God in my heart. It is only now that I understand those famous words of Jesus from the Cross, “Father forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing”. Jesus exonerates his accusers; he declares them innocent. There is NOTHING to forgive.

Happiness is Unconditional Love. No one owes you and you owe no one. Drop all your expectations, all your attachments, all your fears, hurts and whatever; allow pure love to rise to the surface, to your consciousness. Become Love, become Divine and no sickness will touch you.

“….they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Mark 16:18

A final word. I have not become a saint. Far from it. But I do experience a deep abiding Peace.

Finding God In All things

Self-Discovery

The Journey of Self-Discovery! 

My Decision to Find Myself!

                                                                                   By Eleni Makedonas

Eleni's sharing has inspired me and so I share it with you. (malcolm rodrigues s.j.)

I can say with confidence that the moment a person truly starts down the path of self-discovery, they will never turn back. Many may ask the question, “What is self-discovery?” or “What do you mean you don’t know who you are?”

The American English Dictionary defines self-discovery as follows:

“a becoming aware of one’s true potential, character, motives, etc.”

Ignorance towards my true self is something I lived with for a long time. Self-discovery means many things. It means finding your purpose in life (we all have a purpose), it means digging deep into your childhood and revealing the experiences that shaped you... good and bad. It means realizing what your beliefs are and living by them. The effects of self-discovery include happiness, fulfillment, clarity and maybe even enlightenment! The journey however is not always an easy road. The journey includes fear, confusion, misunderstanding, doubt and literally re-visiting all your choices in life. I like to refer to it as spring-cleaning of the mind, your emotions and your surroundings (including the people in your life). It requires making some tough decisions and sticking to them. My journey so far has seen me cut people out of my life. I call them the “takers.” They were takers because I allowed them to be and it wasn’t until I realized that many of these relationships were one-sided — self-discovery — that I decided to cut them out. It has also seen me completely change the course of my life and start to follow my true passion and purpose (this blog). I have also started to set intentions and no longer have expectations from others — okay... this one is really hard for me and it’s a work in progress — but instead I have started to look within for answers. I’ve had several set backs along the way and I have no doubt I will have many more but, I’m not giving up.

What I know for sure is that the journey is worth taking. I am slowly becoming calmer, more aware and more tolerant. I am learning how to pay attention to my feelings and understand myself better.

What I know for sure is that I have been very hard on myself for most of my life. I have not been truthful with myself and have had unrealistic expectations therefore, setting myself up for disappointment. Why do we do this? Why do we lie to ourselves? And more importantly, why do we allow ourselves to get away with it? When someone else lies to me and I find out about it I freak out. “How dare he lie to me? Does she think I’m stupid?” but, we lie to ourselves profusely and even cover up our own lies by accepting them as truth in order to reassure ourselves that it’s okay??!?!?!

For example: I have body image issues. I have always had body image issues yet covered it up by lying to myself. When I was 14 I even tried to starve myself thin. I would convince myself that I was happy with the way I looked when deep down I knew I wasn’t. I worked so hard to cover up how I really felt by masking my true feelings. “I’m happy with my hips” I would tell myself and “I like my perky butt,” even though deep down I hated the way I looked. I’m not implying that what I was feeling was a good thing but, it was what I was feeling and ignoring it, or pretending it didn’t exist was doing no good to me — or my body image issues. Eventually, it became exhausting. Recently, I started working on accepting the fact that I have body image issues and acknowledging my feelings towards them. I am not suppressing the feelings I have anymore instead, I am admitting to them therefore diminishing the threat they once held upon me and reducing the hold they had on my life. There comes a freedom with accepting your feelings and emotions. It’s like a release of some sort. Like you’ve identified the elephant in the room and waved at him so you no longer have to pretend he’s not there. Once you acknowledge the elephant in the room he doesn’t bother you anymore. You learn to co-exist and be okay with his presence and not allow him to control how you act and feel anymore.

What I know for sure is that being true to my feelings and acknowledging them as well as validating them has released so much fear in me. It has released my fear of not being good enough as well as my fear of not living up to the expectations I set for myself. What I know for sure is that we are usually our own worst enemy. We hold ourselves back in so many ways and I am ready to move away from that pattern. I’m not suggesting that these fears no longer exist within me because they certainly do and, I don’t think they will ever go away but now that I am aware of my true feelings and now that I am becoming conscious of my real beliefs, they no longer have a strangle hold on my life. Instead, I have a hold on how they can or cannot affect me.

My message is this... Stop being your own worst enemy! Stop lying to yourself about your emotions and feelings and start accepting them and allowing yourself to feel whatever is it you feel. The freedom you will feel within yourself is reward enough however, the universe will give you back the love that you have finally and justifiably started to give yourself. This I promise you!

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man