Our Body is a Metaphor

By: Suzanne Maiden

Bodies talk.  Apparently they have a lot to say.  Our body speaks metaphorically and tells us exactly what we need to know about our psychological wounding.  Through illness, the body speaks symbolically.  The anatomical location and chakra point of an illness provide us with an abundance of  information.  Oh, many of you will resist my words and immediately become defensive and react with cognitive reasoning.  Some will intellectualize, deny, and refute this reality.  It can feel like too much to integrate that we may have some ownership in our health issues.  

However, in my humble opinion, our resistance does not negate this phenomenon.  The mind and body are intimately, deeply, inexorably woven.  The data support the mind-body connection.  If you find yourself defensive, it is OK.  I get it.  I was too.  But it is important, both physically and psychologically to understand the enormous impact psyche has on the body.  Because when we integrate our cognition with psyche, we awaken.  We identify aspects of soul which need emotional  healing.  Illness forces the issue.

I am a cancer survivor.  I do not like to dwell on this, nor is this a covert means to elicit compassion.  I am OK with my experience.  Cancer catapulted my awareness.  I was forced to examine what toxic energies I continued to carry.  But this essay’s focus is not my cancer history.  My own cancer is merly a springboard to provide validity on how I regard my body as a metaphor for what needed psychological healing.  And, my own therapist had to drag me to this realization – I kicked and screamed and resisted his interpretation of events the entire way.  But now I get it.  He will chuckle at this writing.  I resisted his assertion that my cancer had anything to do with my emotional wounding.  How dare he even suggest that I had culpability!  But I surely did.  Unless I actively worked my stuff, I knew I would die.  I’ve never met one other person who has survived my type particular type of cancer- a 9cm hemangiopericytoma.  The only people I’ve met who are familiar with this rare disease are the loved one’s left behind.   

What illnesses present themselves to you?  Where are they located?  Our Western culture, so egotistically inflated with ‘scientific data’ often denounces Eastern thoughts which suggest illness and psyche directly correlate.  However, Western medicine is coming around.  I understand that even Ivy League Medical Schools offer alternative medicine curriculum and expose future physicians to cultural variations for healing.  This is good.  I do not suggest that anyone sacrifice Western medicine to exclusively embrace Eastern philosophy.  I suggest we integrate both philosophies – for they are not mutually exclusive but can live as companions.  East and West finally meet, meld and mesh.  I think this is wise.