Carol Ritberger - Healing Happens With Your Help: Understanding the Hidden Meanings Behind Illness

CONTENTS

Illness Isnt
about the Obvious

The purpose of this book is straightforward: Its about healing and what you can do to heal yourself. However, this isnt necessarily easy, because how you engage in the process is strongly influenced by the perceptions you have.

Let me explain. If you see illness as the result of external factors such as viruses, bacterial infections, environmental contaminants, or something you ingest, then your approach to healing will be focused primarily on the needs of the body. If you view illness as a form of psychological payback for something youve done wrong, then it will be difficult for you to understand it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself, serving as a powerful catalyst to change what is causing you pain and suffering in your life. If you expect others to heal you and you buy into the treatment mentality that one size fits all, then you wont understand that illness is your individual quest for wholeness. Most important, if you think that its about the obvious, then the chances of your successfully healing yourself are significantly decreased, because it isnt about whats readily apparent. Instead, it concerns the underlying factors that strongly impact every aspect of your life.

Illness is about what lies deep within the human psychethe thoughts, emotions, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and core themes that influence what we think, how we feel about ourselves, why we act the way we do, our sense of reality, and whether we believe that we can heal ourselves or not. It reflects the stories of our life and discloses how conditioning has impacted our sense of self. And it doesnt just affect the body; it has an impact on the mind, the energy body, and the soul as well. In a sense, it represents a psychospiritual disconnection between these elements and brings to our attention the changes that must be made if were to restore ourselves to good health.

Via the soul/mind/body connection, illness reveals where were energetically storing negative emotions in our organs, glands, and muscles and where were holding fears and beliefs in our spine. Since it involves more than meets the eye, then how we treat it must be expanded from just dealing with the needs of the body to addressing the source thats responsible for the disconnectionthe mind. Without a change in mental state, the soul, the energy body, and the physical self will continue to be at the mercy of the factors that lie deep within the workings of the mind.

The Perception of Separation

Throughout the history of medicine, physicians and metaphysicians have agreed on the factors that contributed to the formation of illness. They knew that addressing it required the healing of the whole self, and that it all must begin with the mental state. So what caused the shift in perception that so radically altered the way illness was viewed, diagnosed, and treated? What caused it to move from the holistic psychospiritual view to the scientific tenet that the mind and body are separate, which chooses not to acknowledge the presence of the soul or its healing powers? This theory clearly devalues the curative powers of the soul and doesnt even deal with its needs. It doesnt take into consideration the psychological factors that are deeply buried within the illness. Why arent these being addressed? Perhaps we can find the answers to these questions if we consider how the evolution of the consciousness of medicine has shifted to the perception of separation that:

Places value only on whats tangible and what can be measured through double-blind studies

Doesnt fully understand the connection between thoughts and emotions and the significant role they play in the formation of illness, specifically on the impact of the immune system