Mapping chronic symptoms in the body
I work with all types of clients and all types of conditions. That’s the beauty of Kinesiology, it’s just so applicable to everything.
The reason for this stems from the foundation upon which Kinesiology is built - there is always a root cause for every condition in the body. Nothing comes out of nothing. Energy doesn’t suddenly appear or disappear, it merely moves. Every symptom therefore has a point of origin, or, as we call it in Kinesiology, a root cause.
We know that symptoms are our friends. It’s our own internal intelligence that sets off the alarm to alert us to a fire in the building, in our building. However, often it’s much easier to ignore it, push it down and avoid looking deeper. It’s such an inbuilt response to silence the alarm rather than investigate further and there’s many reasons for this.
Why we ignore our symptoms
Often, we don’t like to admit a fault within ourselves, it’s a sign of weakness that we’d rather not acknowledge. In our busy, fast-paced lives, where we are conditioned to constantly push and strive, we certainly don't want to slow down and rest up.
There’s also an element of shame involved, especially when a symptom is something we’re embarrassed by such as an irritable bowel, something unsightly such as acne or something that we fear judgment from, like depression. It’s much easier to just manage it, to adapt, to work life around it.
We also like to avoid pain and fear. We worry that a symptom might mean something more sinister, something that’s dreadfully wrong with us. We think ‘what if?’ it’s something more serious, and so choose to bury it in the dark recesses of our worry list where it just sits, festering. Worry can be utterly overwhelming but the irony is, the more we ignore something, the more we worry about it and the more it takes up space in our minds.
The thing is, when we tackle fear with fearlessness, it goes. When we shine a spotlight into the area of shame, panic or fear it isn't nearly as bad as we imagine. Not only is it smaller and more manageable but it’s incredibly empowering.
Symptom-management of chronic conditions
Often, when we have a chronic condition in the body, it’s due to an imbalance that has been ignored for a long time. There is no blame here, there is only understanding. When we understand we are empowered.
We also have to be very honest with ourselves if there’s a symptom that we’ve been dealing with for a long time. Is it something that we’ve wanted to ignore or is it something that we just haven’t known how to handle so have pushed it down and managed as best we can?
As I’ve already explained, this is an entirely normal approach that every single person does. It’s also how we have been conditioned to behave. The traditional approach to symptoms in our current medical climate leans on symptom-management rather than a root cause approach. It’s why the pharmaceutical industry is booming, they are selling medication that gives us the ability to live as normally as we can, without pain.
For some of us this is a wonderful gift, but for others it merely causes the fire alarm in the body to wail even louder and more violently.
With chronic symptoms, we often need only to get to the root cause, to lessen the severity of the symptoms. This requires addressing it with a multi-dimensional approach, taking into account the emotional, chemical and structural causations of this condition. And, from experience, chronic symptoms have a very deep-rooted emotional cause.
A one-dimmensional approach to healing
I see a variety of symptoms in clients. And not just physical ones, emotional ones too. You can’t separate the body and the mind; it is all one vast intelligence that is in constant communication.
Scientists have been studying psychoneuroimmunology for years now, understanding how our thoughts affect our immune response. In reality, everything we think, every trauma we’ve experienced and every stressful emotion, whether it be anger, grief or fear, is lodged into our body, intricately embedded into our cellular memory.
The problem is, we’re not taught how to map emotional stress in our bodies. We have no idea where these emotions lodge themselves. This is why, when we have a symptom manifest in one area of the body, we treat only that area.
We also tend to address our health with a one-dimensional approach. If we have uncomfortable symptoms in our stomach, small or large intestine, we address our diet. If we have emotional symptoms such as anxiety or panic attacks, we take a therapeutic approach. If we have a structural pain, aches or tension in the body we always treat ourselves with a musculoskeletal approach.
The thing is, often a symptom will manifest in an area of the body that stems from an entirely different realm of the body. Here’s a few examples to explain this concept in a little more detail.
Approaching chronic symptoms with a multi-dimensional approach
Structural pain can be caused by something simple such as deficiency in a mineral or a sensitivity to a particular food type that puts a strain on the muscles neurologically linked to the digestive tract, which are often all the lower back muscles.
Lower back pain is also linked to dehydration and lack of omega oils and I’ve witnessed clients’ pain disappear just through drinking more water and taking oils. Pain around the top of the shoulders and neck is also highly linked to stress, feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders and fear.
Emotional stress such as anxiety and panic attacks are very often linked to a deficiency in B vitamins, an extremely stressed endocrine and chronic dehydration. Insomnia and our inability to switch off, can also be massively helped by a combination of herbs which soothe an extremely stressed nervous system.
As can working on the temporomandibular joint which holds all our stress and tension. If this joint is tense, it can be a primary cause of sciatica, an excruciating condition which is often very easy to fix through working on the jaw.
Digestive and bowel issues can also have a very different cause. We store the majority of our stress in our gut. If we’re constipated, we are often holding onto grief, unwilling to let go. If we experience bloating in our small intestine, above our belly button, we are feeling a lack of joy. I see a lot of clients with this particular bloating and stress is always a primary reason, above anything nutritional.
Similarly with other uncomfortable symptoms such as bladder infections or chronic cystitis, an emotional stress around fear is highly relevant, as well as looking into natural anti-inflammatories such as nutritional supplementation and things like gluten and sugar in the diet.
Deep-seated trauma is the root of many chronic symptoms
From experience, I’d say that, more often than not, a deep-seated emotional trauma is the root of many physical and seemingly unlinked symptoms, especially chronic ones we’ve had for a long time.
This is what I specialise in because when a client starts to link a condition to an emotion, it’s liberating for them. All the body wants us to do is to acknowledge the pain, address the hurt and to release the trauma, which is exactly what we do in Kinesiology.
By taking this multidimensional and metaphysical approach to understanding how, and why, symptoms manifest in certain areas of the body, we empower ourselves to take our healing into our own hands. We shift stagnant energy out of our body, allowing us to finally move on with our lives, free from pain and unnecessary suffering.
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