What Are You?

I believe Westen culture have performed miracles in the advancement of modern medicine. I also think they’ve gotten it devastatingly wrong.

What are we?

In western culture especially, we are taught we are one thing. One dimensional. We are the parts of us we can see, nothing more. We, as humans, are bones, flesh, blood and tissue. Our medical system is based, for the most part, on this principal. It is only relatively recently we stopped treating depression with lobotomies and bipolar with social exile. We are fed pills to fix our tissues. If the pills do not fix our issues, then we are deemed “broken”. We are irreparable. The amount of people who came into my physiotherapy room and jokingly asked me to perform an amputation, or to “take them out back and put them down” was a daily phenomenon. My clients may have been joking, but I believe their words held a fundamental truth on how our society sees us, and subsequently, how we see ourselves. If we are not productive, we are broken.

Well, what do I know?

I wasn’t raised spiritual, nor holistic. My mind is an analytical one, and for me to truly understand something, I must understand the “why”. I am not someone who does things just because “it is how it had always been done.” This is maybe my greatest strength, and greatest torture.

I studied physiotherapy, a four-year degree where we were required to learn and memorize every muscle, bone, blood vessel and nerve in the entire human body (that was just the first year). Even though my education dissected (quit literally) every secret of the human flesh, the institution was still left with questions. Nearly every lecture I attended, we would discuss a condition with no known cure, and, more disturbingly, no known cause. These conditions we brushed over. There was no speculation, only an expectation to take on the belief that the people with those conditions are irreparably broken. Yes, we can enable them to move through the world with more ease, but, at the end of the day, we don’t know why, nor how, their body deviated from health, and a blatant refusal to search for answers beyond the physical human body. Even a fear, perhaps.

 The questions only accumulated over the course of a further four years treating clients. Eight years of education on western medicine, and I was left with more doubt than I started with. I am not naive enough to believe our healers will be able to understand the nature of every condition, but the ones with question marks were (are) commonplace, and this wasn’t (isn’t) good enough for me.

Some of the conditions I list below, are the conditions we do not know (according to western research) how or why they arise, nor how or why they cannot heal:

• Multiple sclerosis
• Muscular dystrophies
• Chronic lower back pain
• Chronic pain in general (pain lasting for periods longer than three months)
• Endometriosis  
• Idiopathic Scoliosis
• Seizures
• Headaches
• Migraines
• Epilepsy
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Fibromyalgia
• Frozen shoulder
• POTS
• Cancer

The list could go on for days. Yet these are conditions I saw, without fail, daily. I was drained, for I couldn’t give my clients a tangible and relatable answer as to why they were in constant pain. So, I went looking. I dove into eastern medicine and some of its ideologies, and I found answers. Answers beyond the physical human body.

The four bodies:

What interested me most, was the idea that we have more than one body. These bodies consist of:

1. The physical body: This body is the densest (particles are closely packed together, like the particles in anything solid). Its why we can see the physical body and not the others. Most issues in the physical body arise from disturbances in the other three. Pain and illness are the last “warning” signs that something is amiss with our health.
2. The emotional body: This body sits not far from our physical. The particles aren’t as closely packed, and the emotional body permeates (goes through) the physical one. This body is connected to our thoughts. If we think something unpleasant, there will be a current in the emotional body, and that current will feel like a specific emotion. It is in this body where emotions can get stuck. If we do not acknowledge and feel the current (the emotion), then it will remain within the emotional body, and will not shift until it is felt. If the stuck emotion remains for some time, then the physical body may emit pain as a warning signal that something isn’t right. Or that we aren’t in “flow”.
3. The mental body:  This body sits beyond the emotional body (in total our energy field reaches about 6 feet in a circle around us, a part of why we are buried “Six feet under”). In this body lies our ego, our belief systems and how we perceive reality – which makes sense as we have to “look through” these bodies to see the world around us. Our reality and how we perceive the world is dictated by these layers.
4. The spiritual body: the spiritual body, I feel, may be the closest to what we understand to be our “soul”. The spiritual layer is coded, like an algorithm or DNA itself. Because it is energy (like all living things) it is infinite. It contains information on our past lives, past karmic patterns, and is how we connect to all things living.

Below I have constructed a flow chart as to how some physical disease may manifest from the “invisible bodies”.

We are more than just our physical bodies. So, if we are to heal ourselves, then we need to shift our minds from thinking the physical body is the problem.

Unfortunately, western culture is a business. “Big Pharma” rely on individuals thinking their bodies are broken beyond repair. If they believe this, they will keep buying pills to mask their pain. They have been sold the lie that their tissues are the issue. Now they are dependent on symptom management and believe they are incapable of returning to health. Unfortunately, the symptom management will worsen of even kill some individuals before they find someone to teach them otherwise.

I hope to change this.