For many years I felt shame about having an illness. Not shame in the way you would think: that I was embarrassed or ashamed of having to go to the doctors and take medication. For me, it was deeper than that.
My library (and garage) were filled with books telling me that I should be able to heal myself.
I grew up around many of the ideas in metaphysics, ones that became wildly popular with the release of The Secret in 2006. The core of these theories is that everything you see in the manifest world is caused by something in the spiritual realm. This has been explained in thousands of ways with everything from thought to vibrations to emotions.
- If you want to be wealthy and your not, well, it’s because you do not have wealth consciousness.
- If you want to be in love and your not, it’s because your emotions are not reflecting love.
- If you want to be successful, and you’re not, you are not attracting successful vibrations.
- And finally, if you want to be healthy, and you’re not, you have something that isn’t healed within.
Some of the most famous quotes in our history point to these ideas:
- “You are what you think about all day long.” – Dr. Robert Schuller
- “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”– Dr. Wayne Dyer
- “Your attitude, not your aptitude, determines your altitude.”– Zig Ziglar
- “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”– Napolean Hill
- “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.”– Ernest Holmes
- “Faith Alone is what really matters.”– Nichiren Daishonin
- “I have a tremendous faith in the innate healing intelligence of the human body.”– Dr. Ron Meyers
I get the intent. Metaphysics is intended to empower people by making us believe that we alone hold the key to our success or failure. This can be very motivational. It can also cause shame.
The Hunt
These ideas sent me on a hunt. If my kidney disease, my scoliosis, my pain and my infertility were caused by something that I had not healed from my past, then I was going to find it and be miraculously cured. I journaled furiously, I said affirmations, I created vision boards, I visualized healthy kidneys and I prayed, over and over again.
When none of that worked, I sought out a hypnotherapist to get into my subconscious, I assumed that was where the negativity must be hiding. When I was still sick, I then hired a healer to work with my aura and energy.
All of that work landed me on the transplant list.
Relating to illness, shame is the idea that there is something wrong with my body because there is something wrong with ME.
And I was ashamed that I couldn’t heal myself. Someone was going to have to give me one of their organs because I was unable to heal the spiritual hole that was causing my illness.
I was confused and frustrated and missing something really big.
The Obvious Missing Piece
Have you ever heard someone respond to the question, “why me?” by saying “why not me?” That is what I was missing.
Illness, stress, painful emotions, crap from our childhood, all of it is part of being alive. The intent of being here on earth and being human is not to have a perfect existence. The ups and downs are part of the deal. Rather you’re a good person, a bad person, a positive person, a negative person or a healed person. Sometimes people get sick. Sometimes those people get better and sometimes they don’t.
That never means that they have damaged emotions or spirit. All of it, healthy, sick, wealthy, poor is under the same spiritual umbrella.
As humans, we all always do the best with what we’ve been given.
Saying Goodbye
How do you let shame go?
You become vulnerable to life. You open yourself up to whatever you are experiencing and welcome it. That includes the loss, the worry, the doctors, the medications and all the great stuff too.
The shame comes from shunning our experience, from thinking that life should be other than it is. That always causes pain.
You can argue that the sky should be purple when it is blue; you can think it isn’t purple because you are not “vibrating” purple, but that does not make the sky blue.
It is okay to allow yourself to be sick and to still know that you are an amazing person who is even stronger now. Nothing to heal, nothing to do, just to be exactly who you already are.