Sickness as a Portal
You know how people say they wish they learned personal finance in school instead of geometry?
Well there’s a whole list of things I wish we learned in school. How to access our intuition, how to understand and harness our sexual energy, how to garden…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about another skill I’d add to that list: how to be sick.
Learning how to be sick is just as important as learning how to heal yourself.
In some ways, they are one in the same. How we deal with illness determines if we will come out on the other side more resilient or if we’ll skate by and remain just as vulnerable to dis-ease as we were before.
Not to toot my own horn here, but I’m actually really good at being sick. That’s why I want to share with you some of the holistic principles and practices I use so that your next bout of illness is less of a burden and more of a transformational portal.
My qualifications? I took a 6-month intensive course on illness and injury when I sustained a pretty gnarly third degree burn and subsequent skin graft.
I’ve supported people in varying degrees of malaise from head cold to inoperable brain tumor. I also gained a dynamic perspective on illness while studying to become an herbalist.
Herb school shattered several paradigms for me, and sickness was one of them. (Herb school also conveniently coincided with me burning my back to a crisp and I am beyond grateful for the ways the plants showed up for me alongside my family, friends, and teachers during that time.)
Before I get into it, I need to acknowledge an important question: Does all illness and injury have a spiritual/energetic meaning behind it, or is sickness merely a consequence of physical/physiological factors?
In my experience, it’s both…
If someone poisons you with arsenic it’s unlikely that you’re going to meditate your way out of death. On the other hand, if you’ve had a life partner for 60 years and they pass away, there’s a good chance that the heartbreak and pain of separation will cause you to die soon after.
To me it’s very clear that our physical bodies display symptoms that are related to the mundane AND the psycho-spiritual.
I also think that there are subtle energetic factors at play more often than we think.
No, not every single sniffle is a profound message from the universe. Sometimes human physical bodies just do what bodies do when exposed to pathogens, harmful substances, bad drivers, etc. Dats it. End of story.
Yes, illness and injury are sometimes just that. But sometimes….they are incredible gifts of reflection, revelation, and resourcing. Did I just pick three R words that sounded good? Maybe.
Times of sickness can be like when Mercury retrogrades. Nothing is working as it “normally” does, which forces us to take a step back, slow down, and ask ourselves if our actions in a given area of life are actually in service to our higher self/truest desires/divine knowing….or not. You might be able to trace the progression of different physical and emotional markers that led you to your current state of dis-ease.
The prevalent way of thinking about illness is that it’s bad, that it means you’re broken or something is wrong with you, and that you have to get over it as soon as possible.
But I see symptoms as neutral (neither good nor bad) communications from your body. And oftentimes these messages are actually trying to get us to pay attention to something that will lead us to reconnaissance, recovery, and rebalancing. There, I did it again with the R words.
Think of your body communicating to you (via illness or symptoms) like an alarm clock trying to communicate to you that you need to wake up for an important meeting. If you wake up when the alarm goes off, you’ll be able to make it on time for the meeting. If you keep snoozing the alarm clock, or go so far as to unplug it altogether, you won’t wake up until it’s too late, and you might have to do some major damage control.
So, are you listening to your body when symptoms arise, or are you trying to shut her up so you can get back to your life as quickly as possible? Cause the thing is, that alarm/your body isn’t going to shut up. It’s just going to get louder and louder until you get the message, which sometimes isn’t until you’re seriously ill.
I can share a personal example: I had a desire to start a project that felt really meaningful to me, a project that would challenge me, that would require creativity, diligence, and vulnerability…but I never really got around to starting it. I was busy (in fact, I took on other work that ultimately distracted me further from giving life to my idea), I filled my days with all the things except this one thing. Ultimately, the project was never started because of fear (of not being good enough, of letting myself or other people down, of wasting my time, blah, blah). And of course, not starting this project gave rise to other fears (mainly fear of missing out on opportunities that could arise should the project be successful). So, there was a lot of fear running in the background, meanwhile I was working myself to the ground doing everything I could to not start this project, and thereby exhausting myself.
Cue: kidney depletion. Physically it looked like UTI symptoms, a rash in an unfortunate area, gnarly hemorrhoids, fatigue, body aches. Emotionally it felt like depression, exhaustion, and deep sadness. And so I was on my ass, in bed, in pain.
The remedy? A deeply nourishing herbal protocol for my kidney/adrenal health, lots of minerals and trace elements, and other stuff I won’t bore you with. What was equally important was journaling, coming back to my desire to start this project, examining it, feeling into why I wanted it so badly and why I had abandoned it, journaling some more, looking my fear in the face, crying a lot, and recommitting to myself.
Did I mention that the kidneys are associated with the emotion of fear in Traditional Chinese Medicine? But that’s for another time…
The point is, this particular illness gave me the amazing opportunity to tend to my physical and psychospiritual health in a beautiful way. I went into the depths of physical and emotional despair so that I could come out of it a better version of myself than I was before. Sorry, I don’t have a less cheesy way of describing it.
So, how can we be sick ~ConSCioUsLy~ ?
Let’s start by addressing the first thing people often do when they fall ill: rushing to get better without considering how they got sick in the first place. And I don’t mean the futile contact tracing (“who did I ‘catch’ this from?”) or getting lost in WebMD rabbit holes. I mean wanting to skip ahead to the part where you feel better without feeling into what message this state of dis-ease is trying to communicate.
Have you been overworking yourself? Are you having trouble communicating your needs to your partner? Are you too afraid of change to take a big risk? Are you getting enough sleep?
Not to mention, a lot of the ways we rush to get better involve overriding the wisdom of our bodies and choosing short term relief over long term health and resiliency.
Ex: taking a NSAID (like Motrin) or Tylenol for a fever. Your body is fevering for a reason (to kill off pathogens) and stopping that process will bring your fever down and make you feel better in the moment, but it also makes it harder for you to fully clear an infection while also compromising your gut mucosa.
(To be clear, I am not completely against taking pharmaceuticals. If your fever is dangerously high, you gotta do what you gotta do.)
Another thing you’ll want to avoid during an illness: passing unfair judgements on yourself or catastrophizing your condition.
This looks like going down a WebMD rabbit hole convincing yourself that your ingrown toenail is actually an incurable parasitic infection.
Sometimes we obsess over our symptoms to the point where we start to feel betrayed by our own bodies. But getting sick is actually a demonstration of our body’s intelligence and resiliency.
To stick with the fever example: The discomfort of a fever is the body raising the internal temperature to discourage pathogenic proliferation, the loss of appetite is a way to shift energy away from digestion and into equipping the immune system, and the fatigue is a way of forcing you to rest and allowing your body to do the hard work of self-preservation while you sleep.
TLDR, what we want to avoid is:
completely tuning out our discomfort and/or rushing to get better
worrying about the past or trying to predict the future
believing we’re broken or fundamentally flawed for experiencing illness or injury.
Instead, we want to orient towards: embodiment, presence, and holism. We do this by:
listening to what our bodies need and then giving ourselves whatever that is
recognizing the opportunity we’re being given to change our behavior or our environment via consciously adapting and re-aligning our lives
offering ourselves the compassionate acceptance aka love we need to truly support our healing on all levels
When we are embodied, we understand that we can’t support our healing by overriding our symptoms. Instead, we inquire what they’re trying to tell us about what’s happening beneath the surface. Simply letting ourselves feel whatever pain or discomfort arises might sound like unnecessary asceticism—and of course there are limits here—but we also can’t bypass or think our way into healing.
Unlike our thoughts, our bodies communicate to us in a way that isn’t tainted by conditioning, judgements, or mental pathology. These messages—even the ones that come from painful sensations—are invaluable. The wisdom that comes through our bodies in moments of pain and suffering is just as potent as the kind that arises from joy and pleasure.
When we are present, we’re not obsessing over the past (who did I catch this cold from? why was I being so absentminded when I slipped on that patch of ice?) and we’re not overly focused on the future either (“I hope I get better in time for the T-Pain concert”, or “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to eat curry again…”).
Being present means we are right here, right now tending to our bodies’ needs as they arise. After all, healing doesn’t happen in the past or the future—it happens in the present moment.
When we orient from holism, we understand that we are not broken. We know health is never really lost. Our bodies always have the capacity to heal and regenerate given the right resources and conditions. AND being sick isn’t a bad thing. It’s a fundamental part of health (kind of like the soreness you feel when you’re building muscle) and you are just as perfect and whole when you’re sick as when you’re not.
You will experience pain and discomfort when you’re sick, but you won’t suffer as much when you see illness within this larger framework.
You won’t suffer because you’ll be able to take advantage of the incredible fucking PORTAL that sickness can lead you through. Because being sick isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s an opportunity for you to give yourself whatever you’ve been starved of—nourishment, rest, emotional release—so that you can be restored and replenished.
On the other side of the sickness portal is a more resilient and radiant you. A version of you that has leveled up in this game of life and is living more authentically and easefully because of it. The version of you that commits to the thing, starts the project, prioritizes rest, changes the way she eats, the way she moves through the world—or whatever else is waiting to be transformed on the other side.
Being sick is never fun, and it’s natural that we would try to push it away. But if we see everything in our lives as happening for us instead of to us, we can recognize the opportunity and beauty that exists in pain and disease. We can be thankful for its teachings and alchemize the lessons into more pleasure, joy, and ultimately better health.