by Liane Mandalis, Possum Creek, NSW, Australia
My whole life I have felt trapped in my body. Now, I know that sounds a bit strange, but this is how it has felt for me. Bodies are dense, they get sick, they are subject to abuse both from ourselves and from others. In short – they get hurt and the pain goes deep. If I choose to not connect too deeply then I won’t get hurt, right? Wrong.
I have spent a lifetime fighting my body and perceiving it as some ‘enemy’ that needed to be at best conquered and at worst abandoned. I was under the belief that our bodies let us down; they shake, they tremble, they vomit, they cry, they bleed, they break, they shut down, they faint, they get SO exhausted… Basically, my body did not feel like a safe place for me to be, but seeing as I had nowhere else to go, the only option was to ‘grin and bear it’. And so I did, through the many ailments that would come and seemingly go, only to come again. Nothing too serious to warrant immediate medical attention, but enough to leave me feeling depleted, depressed, disconnected (but from what?), anxious and exhausted. At one stage it all felt ‘too much’ and I suffered from bouts of anxiety and panic attacks. I was a nervous wreck, ever ready to fight or take flight.
Despite this, I have always been a cheerful person but I could never sustain the joy for long. My joy was punctuated with sudden bouts of excitement followed by dark pits of despair. I mostly avoided doctors (I didn’t trust them) so I never got an official diagnosis, preferring instead to see endless practitioners of acupuncture, homeopathy, natural medicines, reflexology etc. – you name it, I tried it. Some would seem to work for a while but the same complaint would resurface years later, either with twice the fury or disguised as another condition altogether.
It wasn’t until I attended a presentation by Serge Benhayon, one Friday night in Byron Bay, Australia that my moment of grace came. Here was this guy, very normal looking considering the backdrop (Byron Bay is a mecca for every style of ‘healer’ under the sun) standing there in a collared shirt (a rarity in those parts and you can imagine my disappointment that there was not a tattoo or feather in sight) and talking about Esoteric Medicine. The short of it being that – we are love and if we choose to not live this love, then we invite a whole manner of illness and dis-ease into our bodies simply because:
It takes more energy to resist love than to be it.
And then, slowly, slowly over the next 3 years…it dawned on me. The reason I was so depleted and exhausted was because I had turned my back and walked away from the love that I am, that we all are. In full reaction to the lack of love I could see being lived in the world and without seemingly realising it, I rejected love, I rejected myself, I rejected the body that I had come to view as my prison, and…I rejected God.
But…
Our bodies are not prisons made of flesh, far from it. Our bodies are Heaven made visible if only we choose to live our true selves within them and express this truth to the world. Once this is felt, it is extremely hard to continue living recklessly, at odds with our bodies and this includes all the ‘perceived good’ we try to inflict on them in an effort to constantly ‘pull them into line’ and ‘conquer the enemy’ when really, in this state, we are our own worst enemy because we are running scared from what we know is true:
We are love and the fleshy vehicle that we reside in is a great body of love that belongs to the Universe/God, which is an even greater body of love that enhouses us all.
If we listen to this, then we let go of the reins that we are gripping for dear life and allow ourselves to follow the impulses that naturally pulse forth from this our greater body. We allow our breath to sync to the rhythm of Nature, the breath of God – the All of Us – and the panic subsides. A body that is brought back to this harmony is a body that will not ‘let you down’ because all that happens to it from this point is in accordance to the bigger picture, the greater plan, our true home and any illness experienced will simply be a clearing of what has been allowed to accumulate from being in resistance to this pull. Our bodies do this regardless of whether we choose this or not, for their particles belong to the Universe and answer to that call and not to our self imposed one. However, true health comes from not overriding or resisting this but accepting and allowing our bodies to respond to what they so naturally are designed to respond to – Love.
Thus, the real pain here that we all feel, and that is the root cause of all illness and dis-ease, is the pain of being in a body of love and not connecting to and expressing that love.
It is a bit like having the ability to sing like an angel but never opening your mouth to sing. Holding back that beauty and that Divine expression is a pain far greater than what can be physically inflicted on the body and that physical pain serves as a marker for the love that we hold back.
Whether we accept it or not, our bodies are forever responding to the Universe that we are an innate part of, no different to the way our oceans respond to the moon or our trees respond to the wind. So, how do we respond to this call – do we fight, or do we flow? The quality of our health is in our hands. More specifically, it is in every particle that we allow to move in tune with this Divine symphony. Thus, the choice to ‘fight’ or ‘flow’ is ours to make, in every single moment and with every given breath.
Inspired by the blog ‘What is true health’ by Rachel Mascord