One of my friends, a talented bodyworker, tells the story of a farmer who came to him for massage. This man was suffering from severe lower back pain. Typical of farmers, this man was not a talker, yet over a period of a few weeks, as my friend worked to relieve the pain and tension, a story emerged. This man co-owned his farm with his brother. Before the onset of the back pain, he and his brother had gotten into terrible arguments. The farmer was faced with the prospect of bowing to his brother to keep the peace, or taking legal action that would split the farm—and the family--possibly for good. During this time he developed debilitating back pain.
As my friend tells it, this case was a tough one. Although he freed up the tension at the end of each session, there was no progress made overall. Each week the farmer would come back, locked up as tightly as the first session. Meanwhile, the issues on the farm became worse. Instead of making a move to somehow resolve an untenable situation, the farmer did nothing. He was stuck.
Finally, after a few weeks of this, my friend sat the man down after the session and gave him the straight truth. He told them that he needed to deal with the issue on the farm, because the emotions surrounding the situation were, without exaggeration, “stuck in his back.” He expressed his willingness to keep working on the farmer, but without some resolution of the emotions involved, he did not expect to make much progress. Although the farmer was not able to verbally express much feeling, his back, on the other hand, was an expert in expressing it.
To heal this man, it might be good to first have a conversation with his back. Of course, my friend had a type of communication with this farmer’s ailing back every week. This illustrates something I notice all the time in my practice: that which we cannot process at the level of our mind and emotions, our body expresses for us. Physical symptoms almost always express something deeper in us that needs to be healed. The conventional doctor deals in a straightforward way with physical symptoms. The alternative healer dives to deeper levels to get at the cause.
There is a strong tendency for men like this farmer to develop diseases on the physical level. These are the sorts of men that are “never sick a day” and then one day die of a heart attack. Thinking back to my blog a couple days ago, Never sick a day…and then cancer, people like this remain without symptoms on the physical level for a while, and then their lack of care for the deeper parts of themselves expresses itself in a physical disease.
Researchers have found a greater association between financial and work stress and lower back pain then they have between herniated discs and back pain. This should make us ponder about what back pain really means. We would think that a herniated disc would be a sure-fire predictor of back pain. Yet, it's not the case. Emotional stress, and financial stress in particular, predicts lower back pain more than a physical reality such as a herniated disc.
Medical doctors, often uncomfortable with strong emotions, usually play along the farmer’s idea that he has a purely physical issue. Imagine three such stuck farmers ending up in the doctor’s office after a couple of years of intense stress on the farm. Farmer #1: Ah, the cardiac enzymes are high; this gentleman has heart trouble. Heart attack could be imminent. Farmer #2 has a frozen shoulder; that’s simple enough, he may need an orthopedic doctor. Farmer #3 with his intestinal problems has “irritable bowel syndrome.” Or maybe an ulcer is visible on the camera. But knowing now that ulcers are “caused by a certain bacteria,” we can “treat” this without any reference to the emotions we traditionally associate with ulcers.
Don’t be fooled. Once you have reached a point where you need a doctor to care for physical disease, you have let things go too far. Learning how to care for the deeper parts of yourself is important. Stress occurs in life. How we are able to process it determines how healthy we remain. Where emotions meld with body is where the good alternative healer works. Thus they are good at preventing disease as well as restoring internal balance once it has occurred.
Recent Comments