To address illness and optimize health we must address our macro-, micro- and meta-physiology. Our macro-physiology needs movement, exercise, stretching, manipulation and, sometimes, surgery. Our micro-physiology is all about nutrition, gut health, hormone balance, enzymes and, sometimes, medication. If these have been addressed and illness persists, we must examine our meta-physiology….the beyond-physical influences in our lives….the psychological and the spiritual. Our thoughts and emotions. This is the realm in which I work.

While the meta-physical realm is the most under-appreciated of the three, at least in our Western culture, it is extraordinarily powerful. So powerful that the AMA lists stress as one of the leading causes of disease! What is stress if not a psychological phenomenon? The beautiful thing about this is that it can be turned around. And, where the mind goes ….the body follows. I hope this essay on Stress and the Psycho-Spiritual Roots of Illness is helpful to you or someone you know.

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Stress sucks. It creates illness, destroys marriages and depletes your resources. Surprisingly, it’s also your ally. Your anger, frustration, disappointment and fears are your friends, not your enemies. Don’t waste them! Your body’s ailments and your relationship challenges are messengers, bringing you invaluable information that, when correctly interpreted, can make you stronger, healthier and happier.

All too often, therapies squelch the messenger before the message can be delivered. The messenger is then forced to get louder (more illness or strife), and you have to spend more time and money finding another therapy to silence it. There is a better way: Get the message! 

Over the course of my 20-year career as a healer, I have repeatedly witnessed clients successfully uncover the hidden messages in their diseases and bring about significant changes in their health and well-being as a result. I experienced this phenomenon firsthand when I discovered a tumor in my breast. I followed a five-step process that I now call Awakening GRACE ™ and the tumor disappeared. Since that time, I have observed that this process can be applied to every stressor in order to expose the message, awaken our spirit of unconditional love and access the extraordinary healing power of grace. 

I would like to invite you to explore three concepts with me. These ideas are foundational to the Awakening GRACE™ process. While they alone will not complete the process for you, if you’re willing to embrace them, they will go a long way toward unlocking the powerful healer within you and show you how to use your stressors to enrich your life.

The three concepts are:

• The real root of your stress has nothing to do with your life.
• There is a brilliant, hidden function in every dysfunction.
• Positive thinking can be disastrously negative to our health, wealth and happiness.

The Real Root of Stress

When I ask people to describe the roots of their stress, they point to things like this: ego, not getting what they need, lack of time, lack of money, lack of direction, demands from others, demands from within, multitasking, lack of control, lack of focus, family pressure, anxiety, and not enough time for everything.

None of these answers really describe the real root of their, or your, stress. The real root of your stress is you. More specifically, your perception of whatever is happening around you causes you to feel stressed. Or not. 

Many years ago I attended a retreat on overcoming suffering. The presenter was Father Theofane, a monk from the Snowmass Monastery, in Colorado. The workshop was held in a beautiful home in Vail, Colorado. Fifteen of us made ourselves comfortable in the owner’s living room, seated on leather couches, in overstuffed armchairs and on comfy pillows. Father Theofane sat on a kitchen stool. He began his presentation by saying: “I am here. I am seated on a stool. I am fine.” He paused, looked around the room and continued. “Now I am looking at you. You’re all sitting on big cushions, on couches, in soft chairs. I am starting to think maybe I would be more comfortable if I was sitting over there instead of on this stool. … Now I am suffering.”

Your thoughts about your experience, not the experience itself, give rise to your stress or suffering. The experience and the people involved in it have nothing to do with that. You are solely responsible for your interpretation of the stimuli and the stress that you feel as a result of your interpretation. 

This may be a very challenging concept for you to grasp. It is for most people. But if you truly want to have a life that is rich and vibrant and nourishing to your soul, it is imperative that you understand this. You must be willing to stop blaming circumstances or other people for your sadness and crediting them for your happiness. Every time you do this, you give your power away, drain your energy and limit yourself to a life of safety and mediocrity. 

You are worth so much more than that! You deserve so much more than that. The world around you is waiting for you to see how extraordinary you are so that you can share your greatest gifts with it. And, surprisingly, your stressors (diseases and relationship conflicts) exist to show you what you’re not honoring in yourself.

The Hidden Function in Dysfunction

We tend to view illnesses or conflicts as dysfunctions that cause us pain and should, therefore, be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. But what if their real function is not to cause pain but to help us avoid pain? What if they are strategies for bypassing or managing deeper pains than we are equipped to face?

Your brain is hardwired to scan for danger. This isn’t a bad thing: it’s a biologically imperative survival mechanism. It’s designed to keep your body alive.

When you perceive pain, you will automatically be driven to avoid it and move in the direction of something more pleasurable. For example, if you put your hand into a fire, your pain-pleasure mechanism will instinctively make you pull your hand away and seek something to soothe the burn. If you did not have an aversion to the pain, you would not react the same way. You would feel no impulse to remove your hand. The fire would spread to the rest of your body and you would burn up and die.

Here’s the thing: Your brain does not know whether the pain is real (the fire is actually burning your hand) or imagined (you’re thinking about your hand burning). It responds to the painful or threatening stimulus in the same way: with a cascade of chemicals—neuropeptides—that initiate a visceral response in your body. 

Your body experiences your emotions (mental phenomena) through the same neuropeptides. In other words, your feelings are experienced in your physiology through chemicals. As neuroscientist and pharmacologist Candace Pert wrote, your mental perceptions are experienced in your body via molecules of emotion. 

Pain is unavoidable. As long as you have a body, you will experience pains and pleasures. They are the bridge between your inner and outer worlds. Information from the outside world generates sensations in your body that you will label as either good or bad, pleasurable or painful. You need these sensations to give you feedback on your environment. This feedback lets you know you’re alive! Think of what it’s like when you’re asleep. You have no conscious awareness of stimuli coming at you from your environment (the pressure of the blanket, the sound of cars passing by, the smell of rain falling outside your window). In those times, devoid of conscious awareness of pains and pleasures, you are also devoid of the awareness of being alive. 

As your mind filters the information coming in from your outside world, it makes judgments about which pains are most important to avoid and which it will live with. In this way you create a hierarchy of pains and, I believe, sometimes create diseases as a way of managing or avoiding the worst of them.

I have observed that disease in the body often reflects three specific dis-eases in the mind. Physical symptoms manifest as strategies for managing mental pain. The symptoms perform the strategic functions of (1) helping us get what we want when we don’t feel we can allow ourselves to get it any other way; (2) dealing with painful emotions we don’t know how to resolve or express effectively; and (3) challenging and invigorating our will to live when we’ve lost our sense of purpose and can’t figure out why we’re here. 

Let me share some stories to illustrate the different functions of so-called dysfunctions. See if you recognize yourself in any of these scenarios. 

Giving ourselves permission

Janice is a quintessential 41-year-old superwoman. A successful and sought-after teacher, she organizes volunteers for community initiatives, serves on multiple boards, manages her children’s schedules and her family’s social life, and is the primary breadwinner in the household. 

She came to see me because she was afflicted with debilitating migraines and painful skin rashes. Each time this happened, she’d have to take a few days off to lie in bed and recuperate. When we looked more closely at the timing of her symptoms, she recognized that they always followed an intense feeling of overwhelm and anxiety. “When I hit that breaking point, all I can think is ‘Stop the world, I want to get off,’ ” she said. She desperately wanted to be relieved of the burden of her responsibilities, but she didn’t want to let anyone down. Her migraines and skin rashes, we recognized, were giving her an acceptable “out.” Some of the main problems or pains her condition helped her avoid were the pains of feeling guilt and shame for not wanting to continue being there for others in the way she had been.

Expressing unresolved emotions

In this next story, Mary’s physical symptoms reflected deep anger and frustration that she could not easily resolve.  

Mary was about 55 years old when she came to see me. As we began our conversation, she blurted out that she was going though an extremely acrimonious divorce that had dragged on for five years. She described her husband as cantankerous and argumentative. Their fights had slowed the proceedings to the point where her lawyer had told her she was not allowed to speak to her husband. This, she said, was so infuriating that she felt crippled. Mary’s body was expressing physically what she could not allow herself to express verbally. Her fingers and hands were curling into fists, the neurological symptoms of Lou Gehrig’s disease, with which she had recently been diagnosed. 

Invigorating your will to live

At the subtlest, or most essential, level, dysfunctions in your body arise from the dreadful inner pain of being unable to identify and live your true purpose, the function for which you were born. The emotional pain that swirls in your mind feels like anxiety, confusion, depression, apathy and boredom. Illness with these roots can be viewed as a strategy for challenging and invigorating your will to live. The deep struggle these diseases can help us to manage is the pain of not knowing how to honor the part of ourselves that wants to be different, assume a different identity and take on more meaningful work. Illnesses at this level are manifestations of the dark night of our superwoman’s soul.  

Twenty years ago when my mother, Katherine, was ill, I took her to see a woman who had cured herself of cancer. This woman told my mother that the one thing she saw that all her female cancer clients had in common was that they were bored. I was shocked when my mother, a well-respected, busy, philosophy-teaching, circle-dancing, cutting-edge metaphysical healer, said, “You know, you’re right. I am bored. I’m tired of being a healer, of doing my work. I feel like I’m waiting for something to pull me forward into life. I just can’t figure out what that is.” 

The function of illness in such cases is to drive us into deep explorations of our innermost longings. It forces us to get in touch with our heart’s priorities and the aspects of ourselves that we have been denying in order to create the life we’ve been living, which no longer feels fulfilling. The pain of the illness can, paradoxically,  assist us in breaking the painful addiction to being who we think we are supposed to be….setting us free to be who we are being called to be.

Did you see yourself?

Which of these three stories resonated with you most? Did you feel a connection to any of the women described here? If so, I encourage you to honor that response. There’s something of value in it for you to apply to your own life. I recommend taking some time now to write it out of your body. 

Write It Out of Your Body

Write a letter to the person you feel most connected to. Tell them what it was about their story that reminded you of yourself. Describe for them your struggle and share with them how your physical symptoms may be reflecting the emotional pains you’re holding inside you. Explore with them how your symptoms may be giving you an “out” of something you don’t want to be doing or an “in” to do what you want to be doing but feel guilty doing it. Let them know if you think your symptoms are somehow tied to feeling lost, unsure of your purpose or bored with being the person you’ve been for so long.

Don’t hold back. Let it all out. Don’t worry—they won’t judge you. After all, they’re just like you. And they know that you, in all your emotional messiness, deserve to be seen and heard. You deserve to be understood. You deserve to be appreciated. 

This is an opportunity to open up and express what you probably don’t often express to many people. I encourage you to write it all out with the intention of illuminating for yourself the hidden gifts or function in your challenge. 

Fully letting go with one’s emotions, even when by oneself, has become an extraordinarily difficult process for many of us. 

We (for the most part) have been conditioned out of giving voice to our anger, blame, hatred, jealousy, insecurity, fears and disappointment. We learned very early on that it was not safe to let loose with our feelings. We were criticized, chastised, told we were overreacting, being too sensitive and that we should somehow be better than that. We believed those messages and took them to heart. Most of us have spent half our lives trying desperately to figure out how to improve ourselves and be of service in ways that assure ourselves that we are good, kind, caring, responsible people worthy of admiration, approval and love. Admitting, even to ourselves, the depth of negativity in our minds is often more than our fragile self-images can handle. The terrible fear that shuts down our hearts and silences our tongues is the fear that the message we received from our primary caregivers, our teachers, the mainstream media, self-help gurus and positive-thinking pundits may be true: ‘we are indeed flawed’. This, to me, is a travesty. 

The Dangerous Consequences of Positive Thinking

You can’t heal what you can’t feel. I believe a major contributor to the unprecedented levels of stress-related illness (both physical and psychological) is not an increase in the amount of pain people are feeling, but rather our growing unwillingness to feel pain.

The truth is, pain and pleasure go hand in hand. You cannot experience one without the other. One of the dangerous ramifications of being besotted with the idea of positive thinking and refusing to feel negative is the death of our spirits. We are meant to feel. Pain is a powerful motivator, an extraordinary teacher and a catalyst for expanding your understanding and appreciation of your higher purpose, your innate strengths and your magnificent inner genius! 

Pains give rise to our lives. Without them we would not be who we are. In fact, we would not exist. The secret to healing them lies not in trying to fix or get rid of them but rather in sinking into them, studying them in ever finer detail until their hidden function is illuminated. In that moment of seeing the divine order in what you had previously perceived as pain, your heart will burst open in an experience of the most powerful healing force we know: grace.  

Through the stresses and struggles in our own lives, particularly the events that crack our hearts wide open, we are given opportunities to sink into ourselves and come to truly see and hear who we are, to understand the different personas within us, and to appreciate the value of each one of them. 

Our stressors are gateways to falling deeply in love with ourselves. When we begin to see the extraordinary brilliance in ourselves, we begin to see it in others. When we begin to see it in others, they begin to see it in themselves. In this way, we change the world.