By Tania Ho
Originally written January 19, 2016
Updated March 29, 2020
“The body is never ill or healthy, for it does no more than express messages from our consciousness,” Thorwald Dethlefsen & Rudiger Dahlke, authors of “The Healing Power of Illness”
I remember a teacher once shared this story with me,
Imagine you are driving a car and suddenly the red alarm light appears in the dashboard. In this scenario, you’ll have two choices:
- You can ignore the red light and keep going. To make it less troublesome, you can cut the cable wire that is connected to the red light. So now the light is gone. Just keep going until, well, the car breaks down finally.
- You can bring it to the garage and ask someone to look at it. They will probably find out what’s wrong and fix it, so the red light will be gone. Then you can keep on driving your car.
Would you choose option 1 or option 2?
I would guess most people will choose option 2 because once you fix the problem, it’s gone. You can now rest assured that the car is safe to drive, and that you don’t have to worry the car breaking down while you are driving.
How does this relate to health?
First, let’s see how health is defined in dictionary.com: “Soundness of body or mind; freedom from disease or ailment”
Health = without disease
That’s pretty much the conventional belief, and yes definitely I agree that this is one indication of we can use to determine if a person is healthy or not. If we are not sick, we are healthy.
In recent years there is more focus on one’s mental and emotional health, with the rising cases of depression and other types of mental illnesses. But still most people believe that when we are not sick mentally, we are healthy.
Most of the time we still treat the body, the mind and emotion as separate entities to heal. We can see from the allopathic medicine point of view. Each part of the body is a different specialty. For example, let’s say if a patient has a liver problem and a skin problem, the patient will see a doctor who is specialized in liver problems, and then separately make an appointment with a dermatologist to treat the skin problems. If the patient has anxiety over his health condition, then he may make an appointment to see a psychologist.
But if we look at health in a holistic way, we find that the physical body is not separate from the mind and emotion. In the world of “Hado” or resonance where we talk about vibrations, one can see that everything is interlinked with each other.
To understand what illness is, one of the most informative books out there is “The Healing Power of Illness” by Thorwald Dethlefsen & Rudiger Dahlke published in 1990.
Dethlefsen and Dahlke wrote,
“Illness is a human condition which indicates that the patient is no longer in order or in harmony at the level of consciousness. This loss of inner balance manifests itself in the body as a symptom. The symptom is at one and the same time a signal and a vehicle of information, for its appearance interrupts our life’s familiar flow and forces us to give the symptom our attention. The symptom alerts us to the fact that we are sick people or sick souls – that is, we have lost our inner, psychological balance…
This ‘ill-ness’ shows up in the body as a symptom, which is something that one has. And so it comes about that what one has is an expression of what one lacks. One lacks some aspect of consciousness, and therefore has a symptom.”
Okay, stay with me here. To elaborate this point further, below is a diagram in the Hado world that expresses how we look at dis-ease in a holistic way, which corresponds to Dethlefsen and Dahlke’s quote on illness.
Notice I wrote “dis-ease”, by the way? What I mean by “dis-ease” is a lack of ease or harmony somewhere in one of these layers.
We can think of our health as layers – like an onion with many layers. Each layer envelops us like a bubble.
Let’s look at the Mind / Personality bubble first. This is our thoughts, our beliefs and our thinking. If you haven’t watched the very awesome documentary called “What the Bleep do we Know?”, I urge you to do so. In the documentary, it discusses that our thoughts and beliefs create the reality we live in. This is not some hocus-pocus by the way, it’s called quantum physics.
So where do our beliefs and thoughts come from? Because we only know about 3% of what we are thinking (our conscious thoughts), it means that we do not know what we are thinking most of the time (our subconscious thoughts).
Beliefs and thought patterns are like apps installed in your phone. We might have “downloaded” a certain belief from our parents, school, society, or culture.
These thoughts can then trigger a certain emotion or feeling within us. In the Hado world (the world of resonance), everything is really just energy and basically energy is a frequency.
So a certain negative emotion, will be represented as a certain frequency or wavelength. A certain negative emotion then may attract a certain type of toxin or virus or sickness, and as a result, the symptom will manifest itself in the physical body. Of course, it’s not only sickness, but certain attitudes or behaviors we exhibit in the physical level are also related to the way of thinking.
Now, going back to the first bubble which says “Spirit / Discarnate entity”, in the Hado world, we believe that negative vibrations from spirits or discarnate entities can affect a person’s way of thinking in a negative way. This is where a person’s spiritual practice comes into place and why it is important to have a spiritual practice.
Basically a strong spiritual practice will help to deter negative attachments from spirits, just as the same as a strong immune system can help deter toxins or viruses (and a strong immune system comes from a healthy mind and body).
Now knowing this, how does this imply to us human beings?
Well, back to the story at the beginning of the article. When we pop a painkiller in our mouth to stop a headache, it’s comparable to cutting the cable wire in the car that links to the red light. We just take out the symptom, but we do not look at the root cause of the problem. We avoid taking responsibility for our total health and sooner or later, another physical problem will manifest.
But when we do examine our thoughts, emotions and our lifestyle, we are then looking at the root cause of the sickness. We become mindful that the symptom is only a message from the physical body, trying to tell us something. Our job is to listen to it, decipher the “code”, and really have the courage to face and see the truth. That’s when healing can occur.
Healing occurs when we take the responsibility back in our hands, and ask ourselves, “Okay what’s going on here? What am I feeling? What are my thoughts? Where do my thoughts come from? Why do I think the way I think? Why do I have these feelings about this issue or person or event?”
This is where “mindfulness” comes in. Nowadays, the term “mindfulness” is quite a popular word. To me, mindfulness does not mean you have to sit in meditation for hours. To me, it means that we are aware of our thoughts and our external world.
Everything on the outside is only a projection of our inner world. When we feel angry or sad about something or someone, it’s not about what someone does or what happens; it’s because somewhere inside us we got something that can be triggered. Now that is something we have to look at. Why is it that we got triggered by this event or this person?
“We forget that we create the situations, then we give our power away by blaming the other person for our frustration. No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for “we” are the only thinkers in our mind. We create our experiences, our reality, and everyone in it. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our mind, we will find it in our lives.” ~ Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life
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At the end of this article, I will conclude with a quote from Dethlefsen and Dahlke’s book, “The Healing Power of Illness”. It sums up what this blog is about.
It’s about understanding why we get sick, and when we do, the symptoms of this sickness are only a message from our body to tell us, “Hey it’s time to pay attention to me, there’s something out of balance in your life now.”
“No longer do they see the symptom as the great energy which it is their highest goal to resist and destroy. Instead they discover in the symptom a partner capable of helping them to discover what they lack and so to overcome their current illness. At this point the symptom becomes a kind of teacher, helping us take responsibility for our own development and the growth of our consciousness – a teacher, though, who can show great severity and harshness should we fail to respect what is in fact our highest law. Illness knows only one goal: to make us become whole. “
Once we can understand this and look at illness as a teacher instead of an enemy to fight, we can embrace this teacher into our lives. We can then listen to what this teacher has to teach us, and have the power and knowledge to create necessary changes in our lives.
“If we can use our problems and illnesses as opportunities to think about how we can change our lives, we have power.”
― Louise L. Hay, The Power Is Within You
