What if your back pain wasn’t just this annoying symptom that you wanted to get rid of? What if it held inside of it the wisdom you needed to become the next better version of you? What if your low energy, mood swings, irritability, headaches, allergies, etc. are telling you that something needs to change in your life? Would you want to learn how to listen to your body’s reorganizational wisdom and make that change or would you choose to ignore it, get rid of it and stay the same?

Unfortunately all too frequently we choose the later. Something goes “wrong” in the way our body is expressing and our first instinct is to get rid of the “problem.” There is an underlying disconnect in our culture between our body and our life. We believe that if our body is expressing itself in unhealthy ways that it is our body’s fault and we go to address the physical structure to correct the dysfunction.

What symptom and disease expression really is, is the body’s attempt to reorganize itself. It means that way your life and body has been functioning no longer works. You need an upgrade so you are destabilizing. Think about when you get a new computer and how fast and well it works. Overtime, if you didn’t upgrade your software programs then your computer would slow down and malfunction. It needs an upgrade. Your body works in a similar fashion. If you don’t upgrade your system then your system slows down and malfunctions. We label this disease.

Destabilization is necessary in order to allow something new to replace it. Back to the computer example above. Let’s say you have an old computer from 1992 and it still works. It never broke down per say, it still turns on and off, you connect via dial-up and it’s slow but you don’t really notice.   It sits on your desk because it is too large and heavy to move. You cannot communicate with any of your friends on chatting systems or send word documents out because your software is incompatible with the newer versions that everyone else has. With all of that said you don’t really notice because it is the same computer that you have been using for 20 years and it still works. If it did breakdown (destabilize) or it quit turning on then you might notice and you would be faced with the decision to upgrade to a newer, more advanced model or to try to fix up the older model. You might try to fix it up once or twice, but it keeps having new problems and eventually you need to upgrade.

Your can think of the body the same way. You can fix it up a few times, meaning take a pain medication to numb the pain or have a surgery to fix the problem, but if you don’t upgrade you then that same energy and out of date software that created the dysfunction in the first place will create new dysfunction and there is a downward spiral to disease and illness.

There is great reorganizational wisdom in how our body expresses symptoms. Symptoms are our body’s little messengers and when we utilize them instead of get rid of them they can be incredible sources of fuel for creating change and sharing our gifts and selves with the world in ways that are important to us. It is simply a matter of how long we wait to make the change that our body is telling us that we need to make. We don’t always know “what to do” or “how to change” or “what is required of us.” Sometimes we are simply too overloaded by life stressors that we can’t pay attention even if we wanted too. Most people haven’t developed the skill set to learn to listen to our body and make the connections between our body and life.

We must start the process exactly where we are, which isn’t necessarily always where we want to be. It is in being with “I have ‘xyz’ and I don’t like it, want it or don’t know what to do about it.” This begins the exploration and the process of reclaiming and reorganizing your body, life and health.

Amanda Hessel, D.C., M.S., L.Ac