How to listen to your symptoms.

February 1, 2006

Listening to Your Symptoms © Martin L. Rossman M.D. (Excerpted from Guided Imagery for Self-Healing: An Essential Resource for Anyone Seeking Wellness, New World Library, 2000) The Common Meanings and Functions of

Illness The Saving Grace of Illness--A Personal Experience Using Imagery to Explore Your Symptoms Anxiety and Resistance Imagery Is Not Just Wishful Thinking How to Listen to Your Symptoms Script: Listening to Your Symptoms Evaluating Your Experience The Next Steps Your inner advisor may have told you what you need to know about your symptoms or illness and how to go about resolving the problem. If so, you may not need to use the technique in this chapter, which begins a dialogue with an image that represents your symptom. If you need to know more, however, or if you are for any reason uncomfortable with the idea of an inner advisor, this exploration will be worthwhile. In a sense, you will be "eliminating the middle man," and attending directly to the source of the problem. You can use

receptive imagery to help you understand the purpose of the symptom and what it will take to allow healing to proceed. In this article, I will expand on the idea of a symptom as feedback, describe the most common meanings and functions of symptoms, discuss some concerns and precautions about using imagery to explore your symptoms, and give you a script that will lead you through an imaginary dialogue with your symptoms. While symptoms are usually unpleasant, they are not the "enemy." In fact, they serve as a natural warning system that, seen in the right perspective, can help keep you in the best possible health. Symptoms are like warning lights or gauges in your car. When the oil light goes on in your car, would you take it to the closest gas station and ask the mechanic to rip out the light? Or tape over it so you can go about your business? Then why go to the doctor looking only for relief of symptoms? You may miss a warning that can

prevent a future catastrophe. Careful histories of people who come down with serious illnesses almost always reveal earlier warning signs that were ignored or treated superficially. Doctors commonly see patients who have treated their stomach pain for years with medications--palliating, tolerating, or ignoring the signal that something is out of balance until something more serious, like a heart attack, brings the message home. Unfortunately, we are not usually taught that our bodies are intelligent and can communicate with us. We are disconnected from our body language, as we are from our emotions. We have somehow given away our birthright in the area of health and healing. We have come to assume that, yes, a symptom is a message--but all it says is "Go see your doctor"! What would it be like if you were able to under-stand your symptoms and use the self-healing intelligence of your body, your feelings, and your spirit?

Why not ask yourself what you need and be receptive to the answers that come from deep within? Is it so strange, after all, to think that the intelligence that created your body in the first place would be able to let you know what it needed in order to be healthy? Whatever created your body--whether you call it God, nature, life, genes, or DNA--was smart enough to make your head. If it can make your head, why not a headache? And if it can make a headache, why not a thought that can tell you what the headache means? Please read the entire article at: http://healthy.net/scr/article.asp?Id=402 "Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit." -

Aurobindo.

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