What is Your Body Trying to Tell You?

MINDBODY | PART 2: The Historian

Elizabeth Carpenter MSOM LAC CLHYP

10 min read

Sometimes your body reveals your past, for the sake of your future.

Symptoms and syndromes can be pointing you to a past you're now ready to deal with,

things important for your spiritual wellbeing & personal growth.

Recall in MINDBODY PART 1: The Mime . . .

Arianna developed a neck rash. She had been stewing over a workplace injustice (a promotion promised to her going to someone junior and less qualified).

Once she understood that her body was miming how she could get herself onto higher ground and started formulating her plan, the rash disappeared.

That’s extremely common.

Meaning, the body often plays out your “spiritual” needs in real time. Symptoms arrive to wake you up to something that’s important for yourwellbeing and growth.

In Arianna’s case, she needed to find the courage inside herself to speak up and assert herself. The particular energy pathway (which is associated with both anger management and courage) and the body part (throat, voice box) plus the red hot angry nature of it were the body miming her deeper needs - a metaphor.

But sometimes the body is more an historian.

Your body tucks away your history

in your cells and energy fields. Things your conscious mind has forgotten.

I say conscious mind, because neither your body nor your subconscious mind have forgotten.

They hold your history in latency.

Then seemingly out of the blue, other times gradually, the body is burdened and struggling greatly.

The un-dealt-with “stuff” making itself known through the body, since you couldn’t (you were a child or powerless somehow), or haven’t, revisited it yet for healing.

No one is to blame for their illness.

But everyone has the power to invite healing into their lives.

As I write this, I’m flipping through my mental files of so many beautiful souls I’ve had the privilege of helping as they went through very serious and difficult things.

You know . . scary diagnosed conditions, debilitating (physical and emotional) problems.

All very real and measurable.

The healing key

is almost always the energy piece, the spiritual piece.

Because your energy is the through line that connects your life story, your physical story, your emotional jams, and your power to heal.

Like Arianna’s rash (body miming the problem and solution), your body maps your history in associated energy centers (your chakras) and communication/transmission lines (your meridian networks).

Chinese medicine, mind-body medicine and energy medicine are sophisticated and prolific on how our deeper selves and needs are reflected in the body’s struggles.

In my experience, we commonly waste a lot of time thinking our problems are just physical. Then we get frustrated when our physical-only fixes are temporary or inadequate.

The mind-body connection is very real. That’s why drug trials need to beat the placebo effect to get to market. That's why we have common sense phrases like "worry yourself sick."

Physical medicine is extremely important - your body, your cells have requirements.

But deep healing - healing that restores the body, renews the spirit, reclaims our lives from emotional turmoil and mental anguish? That’s not this herb, that drug, this surgery…

That’s the big stuff. That’s healing.

The word "healing" means “to make whole.”

As in all the parts are there but they need to get reconnected.

As in something is missing and needs to be found and restored.

Healing is always available to you.

Take Sophie (who is 38 today and pregnant). She came to see me for infertility. Brilliant, kind, successful, in love, married.

But she never really had a menstrual cycle. She had a couple periods over the years randomly. She was put on birth control to force a cycle for a while, but when she wanted to conceive - nada. IVF didn’t work because she didn’t have any follicles (egg holder hormone factories) on the surface of her ovaries.

You can imagine how devastating this would be. The frustration, the self-loathing, the painful self-talk, “I’m not really a woman,” the resentment “everyone else can do this simple biologic thing,” shame.

Her body, as it turns out, was quite fertile - hence the baby she’ll be birthing in about a month. But those eggs? They were staying safe, hiding deep within her ovaries, not budging until it was "time."

But she had to wade through history first

and discover what it was all about.

Her body was holding painful conflicts about being born a girl, and what it means to be a woman, from 20 years ago!

She’d well moved on in every way from a painful childhood and trauma.

Except her body. Her body was keeping a promise she’d made to herself at age 11.

Again - like in body as mime - we see the body struggling in the energy center representing the spiritual, internal, “who am I and what do I need?” location. For Sophie, her womb.

This time - the conflict is not exactly current. Though in some ways voices of authority from her past were living in her body in the present.

What she went through in her home, and saw her mom go through? She vowed to herself she’d never let that happen when she grew up. And she didn’t. She’s a dynamo professional. Has a life full of love and friendship. She speaks on women’s leadership.

It was time. Infertility had her on her knees. She was ready to liberate fully from the past.

Although she had moved on in most ways, the trauma of childhood was still running around her mind making her emotionally sick. She'd done tons of talk therapy already, so she already "saw and understood" what happened.

But the pain of it all was very much alive in her thoughts, energy centers and channels, and her body was physically playing it out.

Her body was saying, “you’re not going to pass any of this forward. You’re not going to be afraid anymore. You’re not going to be ashamed of what happened to you anymore. You’re ready to deal with this.”

She needed to update her subconscious files.

And she needed to re-see childhood from the vantage point of who she is now.

She needed to believe, about herself, the things she believed for everyone else and humanity in general.

Finally, she needed to know she was fully sovereign - able to bring complete healing into her experience.

You already know the completely wonderful happy ending to this story. She was never infertile. She had plenty of eggs. Now her body would bring them forward; time to make a new vow, take on a new mantra: wholeness.

Healing of spirit. Shift in the energy blueprint. The body free to reclaim original programming.

Thank goodness your body “has your back.”

Your deeper self wants you to be so happy, so powerful, so fully authentic and alive.

A mentor of mine once said (and boy did it stick, for personal and professional reasons), “All sickness is home sickness.”

And by that I understood, going home means “home to who we really are” - authentically ourselves, free of the garbage we picked up along the way and mistook for “us,” free to create and enjoy life fully because we feel safe and whole and powerful enough to do so.

I’ve seen tumors shrink, autoimmune conditions go undetectable.

I’ve seen all manner of gastrointestinal issues fade away.

I've seen completely crazy hormone stuff just let up . . . and so much more….when YOU see your body as friend instead of enemy, teacher instead of traitor.

Your body is your home in this life.

It yearns for your great happiness and wellbeing.

It's ready when you are.

You don’t have to do it on your own. If you want help, check out the MindBody Mentorship or Next Level Healing.

Sometimes your body reveals your past, for the sake of your future.

Pointing you to history you're now ready to deal with, to things important for your spiritual wellbeing & personal growth.

Recall in MINDBODY PART 1: The Mime