If you've recently been sick, you might remember wondering, "What is happening to me?" You know something is off, but can't quite describe it. You wish you could find some relief, but struggle even to find the words to explain how you are feeling.
Experiences in your body often don't translate easily into words. You wish your body would just communicate in plain English, but instead it talks to you in muddled feelings, symptoms, and emotions that you must discover and sort out. Sometimes you might wish your body wasn't so confusing.
Fortunately, Ayurveda is an entire system of medicine designed to make your body less confusing. With Ayurveda, you'll feel more confident that you know what is happening in your body. To begin, you start by listening to your body. Your emotions, aches, and pains are your body's way of 'talking' to you, and it behooves you to hear the message.
There's an art form to figuring out how you are feeling. Many important symptoms are hard to feel, almost as if they are hidden in a blind spot. It could be butterflies in your belly, a heavy, droopy feeling your chest, or maybe an ache in your upper sinuses. It could be feelings that are even more subtle than this. You might feel 'overwhelmed' or 'under pressure', for example. You may have had the feeling for so long that you've forgotten it's there - it has become a part of you and your awareness of it seems to fade into the background. You become blind to it.
These mysterious feelings and emotions - the things you feel even though you aren't aware yet that you feel them - are often the roots of true disease. In Ayurveda, the job of the physician is to help you find your blind spots, to expose feelings you forgot existed. Ayurveda helps you notice, feel, and articulate what is happening in these blind spots so that they don't progress into full-blown diseases.
Most people forget to address these roots and instead concentrate on symptoms that are more visible or obvious, like weight gain, auto-immune disorders, or hypothyroid. They don't notice how they are feeling underneath it all or how their body is communicating with them from moment to moment. It is vitally important that you know what is going on in your body before starting therapy. Usually, therapy is the easy part. The more you know your body, the more you will naturally start to discover solutions. So what is really important isn't the therapy you've chosen, but making the choice to discover these subtle signs and symptoms in your body. That is why I focus less on therapy and more on self-discovery in my clinic.
So next time you feel a little under the weather and catch yourself wondering, "What is happening to me?" find a nice place to sit down, close your eyes, and feel your feelings. Notice each and every physical and emotional sensation. Grab a pencil and your journal and put your feelings down into words. You will find this practice enormously useful to discover insight into your body and your illnesses.
If "feel your feelings" seems a bit ambiguous, begin by checking your body and noticing any sensations you have. Scan your body from head to toe. Find any spot in your body with sensation, no matter how strong or weak. Completely immerse yourself in the sensation; get lost in it. If it's a spot in your body or an organ, consider lightly palpating (massaging) the area without creating "bad" pain and see how the sensation changes. Now try to write down the sensation. Here are some examples:
- A persistent tightness between your shoulder blades
- A searing pain in your calf
- A noisy gurgling in the pit of your tummy
- Pressure around your heart
- A heaviness in the chest
- Anxiety in your gut
- A dull ache in your sinuses
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