The Inner Voice

Recently I had a difficult experience with a client.  What I perceived as the greatest roadblock to improvement was the fact that she had developed a habit of always "doing" something for every symptom she had.  She felt the need to manage her body as though it couldn't manage on its own.  When I began pushing her to try allowing her body to just "be", she became very defensive and very scared to let go of her self-medicating ways (even though she was using herbal remedies predominantly).  She insisted that she would have terrible, debilitating symptoms and unless I was going to give her replacements for the things she would normally take, she couldn't consider that.  The more I pushed, the louder she became, until she was exploding with her emotions at a volume that everyone in the clinic could hear. Then it hit me ... She is drowning out her inner voice.  The more her inner voice began to speak, the more she needed to drown it out.  In order to heal, you have to be able to trust that your body has an innate knowledge of balance and healing.  This intelligence knows exactly what needs to occur in the body in order for health to be your constant companion.  When you interfere with the flow and direction of this body intelligence, then it creates a disturbance which makes it difficult to handle challenges and to heal from immune assaults.

When I was first studying Naturopathy more than 30 years ago, one of my mentors said to me that you have to trust in this innate intelligence, which is a continually unfolding force for balance, health and goodness which is constantly at work in all dimensions.  We can occasionally touch this force when we are very quiet and listen to what the body tells us.  When we raise our voice, when we fill the space around us with noise, we block our ability to tap into the current of this force.  With all the noise, our feeble attempts to touch the current actually cause us pain like an electrical current.  It scares us because we have lost our ability to trust the inner voice.

Our attempts to direct this force only interferes with it.  Our willingness to relax into it and to accept the uncomfortable feelings that come from moving out of our rut and into this current bring us the benefit of its working on our behalf.  Without faith and trust in this force, we are frantically trying to control what is not our business to control and to fix what is not in our power to fix.  What we are trying to control is much better off without our interference, and what we're trying to fix can't be fixed by us anyway.

I caused pain to this client.  Her response was to lash out with her emotions.  My hope is that something will bring her to a place where she will be able to step into the current and endure the effects of the change.  Because when she does, she will be able to stop struggling and finally have the support she so desperately wants.  The support of her own body.