Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Spirituality
When I was in high school, my father gave my siblings and me a book called The Road Less Traveled.
I read and re-read this book many times over the years, and in fact went on to read all of the books written by M. Scott Peck, all of which were about mental health, and spirituality. M. Scott Peck was a Harvard trained psychiatrist and writer, who wrote about the spiritual growth that was required in order to heal depression, anxiety, and various forms of mental illness. He lived in rural Connecticut, and I always imagined him leading a leafy Connecticut, Ivy League, intellectual life. When he died about 10 years ago I learned he struggled with alcohol, was a habitual cigarette and pot smoker,and that he was estranged from his children. This was interesting to me, but didn't take anything away from his message of psychic pain as a call to spiritual growth.And the necessity to address spirituality not only within the confines of mental health, but in our daily lives as well. Every day spirituality.Because we are here to be the word made manifest. We are here to bring out the truth of our souls, and if that truth is blocked, we become sick. This is quite true on the level of the energetic body. In my studies of both Yoga and energy healing, blockages occur on the energetic level of the body, before they manifest on the physical level.
I recently re-read The Road Less Travelled, and was impressed with how heavy the energy of the writing was. I suppose with the onslaught of easy access to information, and the fast moving and changing energy of our times...things are lighter and more swiftly moving, including our books.In fact, everything is moving faster now, and in a way, we have to struggle to keep up.
If we can remember that we are a trinity of mind/body/spirit, then maybe we can learn to address illness from a mental, spiritual and, physical aspect. This is most dramatically obvious in functional medical disorders like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Adrenal Fatigue,Fibromyalgia, and IBS. These are clearly debilitating illnesses that disturb the ability to function in every day life. They are undoubtedly physical illnesses that are stress related. They have no medical cure. But they can be easily and swiftly healed if they are addressed from the proper spiritual context. People get these illnesses for a very clear reason, and most often because they have unwittingly strayed off their soul's path. For me, my body shut down. It would not function. I was headed the wrong way, and it was the very healthiest part of me that stopped functioning, in order to get my attention. It was a clear signal to me to change something that I didn't know needed changing. My recovery got lost in the fog of doctors and diets and supplements, and tests, and medications, many of which made me worse. It's not until I addressed my illness for what it was...autonomic nervous system dysfunction, and then found the root cause of the autonomic nervous system dysfunction, which was stress, and then understood stress to be a result of blocking my true self, and then deciphered the message of the symptoms my body was creating, that I recovered. But I only found one medical doctor who addressed CFS/Adrenal Fatigue as autonomic nervous system dysfunction, and only one psychologist who understood this to be the cause. I find that quite frustrating.
What continues to frustrate me is that the medical profession doesn't have a good handle on the cause and cure of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I think they are looking in all of the wrong places. They are focused on the really strange, variable, and debilitating symptoms of CFS, and often throwing out diagnoses and labels in regards to symptoms. At one time I could have had several different very serious diagnoses, and if I didn't know better, I would have bought into them, and lived the life of someone who was chronically ill, a patient, still sick and debilitated, with a handful of diagnoses to prove it. ( I can think of several right now...POTS, food allergies, peripheral neuropathy, chronic insomnia, hypoglycemia). I don't think the medical profession will catch up, until they learn to think in terms of causes rather than symptoms. I hope society will catch up too, and understand that we are first and foremost souls, and that we are more special and more powerful than we can even imagine. We are divine!
I read and re-read this book many times over the years, and in fact went on to read all of the books written by M. Scott Peck, all of which were about mental health, and spirituality. M. Scott Peck was a Harvard trained psychiatrist and writer, who wrote about the spiritual growth that was required in order to heal depression, anxiety, and various forms of mental illness. He lived in rural Connecticut, and I always imagined him leading a leafy Connecticut, Ivy League, intellectual life. When he died about 10 years ago I learned he struggled with alcohol, was a habitual cigarette and pot smoker,and that he was estranged from his children. This was interesting to me, but didn't take anything away from his message of psychic pain as a call to spiritual growth.And the necessity to address spirituality not only within the confines of mental health, but in our daily lives as well. Every day spirituality.Because we are here to be the word made manifest. We are here to bring out the truth of our souls, and if that truth is blocked, we become sick. This is quite true on the level of the energetic body. In my studies of both Yoga and energy healing, blockages occur on the energetic level of the body, before they manifest on the physical level.
I recently re-read The Road Less Travelled, and was impressed with how heavy the energy of the writing was. I suppose with the onslaught of easy access to information, and the fast moving and changing energy of our times...things are lighter and more swiftly moving, including our books.In fact, everything is moving faster now, and in a way, we have to struggle to keep up.
If we can remember that we are a trinity of mind/body/spirit, then maybe we can learn to address illness from a mental, spiritual and, physical aspect. This is most dramatically obvious in functional medical disorders like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Adrenal Fatigue,Fibromyalgia, and IBS. These are clearly debilitating illnesses that disturb the ability to function in every day life. They are undoubtedly physical illnesses that are stress related. They have no medical cure. But they can be easily and swiftly healed if they are addressed from the proper spiritual context. People get these illnesses for a very clear reason, and most often because they have unwittingly strayed off their soul's path. For me, my body shut down. It would not function. I was headed the wrong way, and it was the very healthiest part of me that stopped functioning, in order to get my attention. It was a clear signal to me to change something that I didn't know needed changing. My recovery got lost in the fog of doctors and diets and supplements, and tests, and medications, many of which made me worse. It's not until I addressed my illness for what it was...autonomic nervous system dysfunction, and then found the root cause of the autonomic nervous system dysfunction, which was stress, and then understood stress to be a result of blocking my true self, and then deciphered the message of the symptoms my body was creating, that I recovered. But I only found one medical doctor who addressed CFS/Adrenal Fatigue as autonomic nervous system dysfunction, and only one psychologist who understood this to be the cause. I find that quite frustrating.
What continues to frustrate me is that the medical profession doesn't have a good handle on the cause and cure of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I think they are looking in all of the wrong places. They are focused on the really strange, variable, and debilitating symptoms of CFS, and often throwing out diagnoses and labels in regards to symptoms. At one time I could have had several different very serious diagnoses, and if I didn't know better, I would have bought into them, and lived the life of someone who was chronically ill, a patient, still sick and debilitated, with a handful of diagnoses to prove it. ( I can think of several right now...POTS, food allergies, peripheral neuropathy, chronic insomnia, hypoglycemia). I don't think the medical profession will catch up, until they learn to think in terms of causes rather than symptoms. I hope society will catch up too, and understand that we are first and foremost souls, and that we are more special and more powerful than we can even imagine. We are divine!
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