Author: Natasha Cecchettini, Psychologist
Part I
The importance of questioning
What is commonly accepted and established regarding the disease tells us little about how illness can contribute to expand the awareness of ourselves.
The truth is that, throughout the process of development of science, the knowledge disseminated and learned became increasingly specialized and technical, and many of the essential questions that were addressed back then, in the cradle of all sciences – the Philosophy – were forgotten, relegated to a dark corner that only a few trailblazers in search of truth could illuminate.
Since the questioning of these essential aspects of the phenomena of Life have long been left aside by man, we must always have a critical look at modern science and its current methods. Every technological advance in medicine, for example, certainly has a use, it is the result of a lot of research work over time. No one will deny this.
Now, what catches our attention is the fact that how the discussion is limited to the different methods and their effectiveness, and how little is said about the theory, or Philosophy on which such methods are based. However, consciously or unconsciously, transparent or hidden, every intervention expresses the Philosophy on which it is based. We need to seek a more questioning and deeper look at everything that happens to us so that experiences can help us increase our self-knowledge and, with that, our emotional intelligence. You can also read the article previously published, here on the blog, with the title “Emotional Intelligence and Health “.
When we experience a fact, an event, we never experience it in a purely objective way. We experience facts according to the meaning we attribute to them, as a result of the way we interpret it based on our “baggage” of learning that we bring from life. For example, when we look at a thermometer if we objectively observe the movement of the volume of liquid mercury in a glass tube, this does not bring us any results, it becomes meaningless. Only when we interpret this fact and give it a meaning, such as a change in temperature (having a fever, or a temperature above normal), does the process become meaningful and useful for us. When people fail to interpret life events in a way that makes their meaning useful to them in their development, they sink into a profound sense of meaninglessness.
So, a key to understanding illnesses, whether related to work or other aspects of life, is to seek a coherent basis of interpretation that brings meaning to that illness, so that it can serve us as an opportunity learning about ourselves.
Since the time of Hippocrates, academic medicine has tried to convince patients that a symptom is something relatively accidental whose cause lies solely in the body’s mechanical and material processes.
Doctors, nurses and other health professionals, in general, carefully avoid interpreting symptoms and thus condemn the disease to meaninglessness. But we cannot only hold professionals responsible, as, in general, patients also accept this perspective without questioning. It’s interesting to also think about why this happens like this, in such a passive way.
When I think about this, the question always comes to mind: “do people want to know the meaning of their illness? Do they want to learn to become self-responsible for their health and other events in their lives? Or do they It is also not comfortable and convenient for the human being’s ego to think that these things happen in a more random way and that therefore they should not involve much reflection on the part of the individual who experiences them…” after all, think about these things It’s a lot of work, isn’t it? And it’s not comfortable at all… Yes, it can be, but it’s also extremely liberating to realize the truth and realize that by working mentally we can, by becoming aware of aspects that were unconscious, make changes in our body.
The car, the lamp and the mechanic
Thorwald Dethlefsen, a psychologist trained at the University of Munich, and Rüdiger Dahlke, doctor and psychotherapist, in the book “Disease as a Path” approach this perspective in a very interesting way and provide the following analogy:
Imagine that you are in a car. A car has several control lamps on the dashboard which only light up when an important function is no longer working as it should. Now, imagine that you are on a trip and one of those little lights, which you don’t know the meaning of, suddenly turns on.
Perhaps you would not be happy with this fact at all and would feel obliged to stop the tour to see what is going on. Despite the very understandable concern, it would not make sense to be angry with the lamp, after all it only informs us about an event that, otherwise, we might not even notice, or else it would take us a long time to notice since, for the driver, he is in a zone “ invisible.”
If we are intelligent, we understand that the fact that the lamp comes on is equivalent to an invitation to look inside and try to understand what is actually happening inside the vehicle. And, if we have difficulty understanding it, we can look for a mechanic to help us.
Of course, we would be very angry if the mechanic turned off the lamp using the simple strategy of removing it. Certainly, the light would no longer come on (and that was in fact what we wanted), but the way in which the problem was “solved” would seem worse to us than incompetence, as we would know that it would cause us a bigger problem further ahead, as the reason why the light came on has not been resolved and the situation would most likely get worse without us realizing it.
So, the car is our body, the control lamp on the dashboard is equivalent to the symptom. What constantly manifests itself in our body as a symptom is the visible expression of an invisible process that wants to interrupt our path through a warning sign indicating that something is not in order. This should make us reflect on the reasons behind the sign that appears to us. It would be absurd to get angry with the symptom, no matter how annoying it may be, in fact it is actually absurd to simply erase it, merely preventing it from manifesting itself, don’t you think?
Yes, but this is how the issue is generally treated in current medicine and most patients are satisfied with this arrangement of simply “turning off the light”.
The symptom must be understood, so that it becomes superfluous and not simply prevented from manifesting itself. But to do this we need to look away from the symptom and examine everything in more depth so we can understand what the symptom is pointing to.
What happens in our body cannot be analyzed separately from the immaterial instance that we call consciousness, after all the word individual means without division. The body does nothing on its own, everyone can be sure of this by simply observing a corpse. When the various bodily functions develop together in a dynamically balanced and harmonious way, we call this global state of the individual health. When one or more functions begin to act in a in a different way than what was previously in resonance with the global balance of the whole, compromises the whole, so we call it illness.
Conscience precedes change
In this way we can see the disease as the questioning of a previously balanced order. However, from another perspective we can see illness as the process that allows consciousness to be brought to a new balance.
Our symptoms have more important things to show us about ourselves than most of our peers, for they (the symptoms) are intimate partners, as they belong to us completely and, in fact, know us. This provokes an honesty that is often difficult to bear, and therefore it is no wonder that we, as humanity, have allowed ourselves to forget the language through which they express themselves. After all, it is much easier to be dishonest. However, refusing to listen to or understand the symptoms will not make them disappear. The proposal I make here is that we know how to listen to them and establish communication with them, as this way they can become transform into incorruptible masters in the search for true Healing. As they tell us what we actually lack in consciousness to reestablish a balanced order.
The difference between this proposal and the commonly accepted proposal is between fighting the disease and transforming with the disease.
Healing occurs exclusively through the transmutation of the disease and never through victory over the symptom, such transformation will occur through the acceptance in consciousness of something that is hidden from it. In this way, the disease does not need to be perceived as an unpleasant deviation from the path, on the contrary, it can be perceived as the path to follow towards healing.
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Check out Part II.
