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Friends,

The body, mind are of course, connected, and their connection becomes undeniable in periods of stress, world, turmoil, and anxiety.

Whether anxiety reveals itself as sore teeth and gums from grinding and TMJ, or you’re getting headaches from not sleeping, or you’re stress eating and your choices or compulsions as to what you’re eating are affecting your overall health…
We can see the connections between our world, our lives, our minds, and our health clearly in times like ours.

Beyond that, when we begin to understand why an illness is there, and what it is revealing to us, we start to touch on how healing and illness are related to the self: who we are as individuals and as people generally. The investigation into how healing, illness, and the self are connected, however, can require the often difficult decision to stop trying to get rid of pain, suffering, and symptom, and rather work to understand, and beyond that to love them.

Love thy enemy, as we are told.

This is not a call in any way to tell people not to seek help from others when they need it, nor a prescription against any sort of medicine. Too often, when people address the spiritual roots of healing, they end up creating almost fundamentalist moral judgments around those who aren’t willing to join in on the perspective.

Instead it is a suggestion of an attentiveness to the hidden dimension of illness: the meaning we can find living alongside of it, and the healing that comes in the form of meaningfulness.

I have experiences with all this myself – from longterm depression to a cancer diagnosis to chronic pain – enduring illness and asking ourselves questions about it and sitting with its presence are part of the treatment we offer ourselves. 

Investigation of the spirit through illness and health is one of the most profound ways to encounter the self. And when it is encountered and healed, it gives the person healing qualities. The power to speak and write about health and pain, the ability to be patient, to live with time differently, to redeem fear, even to think about death.

To talk about all of this, I invited LORY WIDMER HESS onto the show. Lory is the author of When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey Through Healing Stories in the Bible, as well as a caregiver and spiritual direction facilitator in Switzerland.

I’m so happy to share this episode with you, and I hope it offers its healing directions for you, and gives new perspectives on how to find your own path to your inner self, your true self which is never suffering.

CH