When I went to take a vitamin and cut my finger on the aluminum wrap, I asked myself: hmmm…Why? It was actually quite hilarious how quickly I tried to assign this simple accident meaning. Apparently, it is that hard-wired into my subconscious; I’m sure being an astrologer, a person who can read symbolic meaning into everything, helps/doesn’t help in this.

I am oriented toward interpreting things, giving them meaning.

Especially physical symptoms.

I think this is in part a hangover from the New Thought Movement, and Goddess bless her, Louise Hay -who led the way in giving a psychological meaning to every single physical ailment you could ever have.

But you know what?

…Not every single thing has a capital “M” Meaning, in life; including physical symptoms.

…Not every symptom must be regarded as a reflection of a deeper wound.

Sometimes physical symptoms are simply a reflection of blocked energy- perhaps the way we are holding our energy needs more Awareness -OR- we are registering dis-resonance in our environment, and people around us -OR- the physical body’s attempt to calibrate to new levels of Conscious Awareness both individually, and in the Collective -OR- we are working through hormonal or bodily aging issues -OR- we are learning something new about ourself.

For many of us, physical symptoms reflect the way we process energy, and respond to stress, differently from those around us.

There is nothing Wrong with any of this.

Regarding illness and symptoms, there are many possibilities to explore – beyond the new thought model of every ailment reflecting a deeper psychological or spiritual issue. Or, trauma recovery (might nervous system dis-regulation be energy sensitivity?). Or, the recurrence of childhood wounds.

I have been having a lot of extremely painful headaches, lately. Instead of trying to “figure out” or “fix” what ails me, I find paying attention to what helps me feel better, and then regarding that as the truest form of information I need to know, helps.

Sometimes I do find the meanings of organs and energy centers useful; other times I do not.  If any line of inquiry or proposed “meaning” causes me to feel worse, loaded down with guilt, judgment, shame, it’s wrong for me. That’s my bottom line. The same goes for exploring family of origin childhood wounding, or seeking the original source of the injury, as a source of a symptom. Often, this just drops me right back into that OLD ENERGY. I immediately feel worse for it.

All said: Sometimes investigation of old wounds and energies is the appropriate response- especially if you are new to this kind of inquiry. But as someone who has done this for decades, my approach has necessarily had to shift over time. If I doggedly pursue every trigger as a symptom of something that needs fixing, that always makes the ouch worse.

For healers, especially: Often the message of a symptom is to simply reach for your healing tools, and explore those. After all, if healing is our life path, why wouldn’t we have our buttons periodically pushed by uncomfortable symptoms? Then symptoms become a matter of fact; taking the sting out of their recurrence, and silencing wound-ologizing and victimhood.

When I approach my physical discomfort from this more neutral place of curiosity, here’s what I discover:  Because of the headaches, I am feeling inward more, noticing when my energy feels flowing and integrated, and when it feels choppy and congested. As such I am proactively doing energy practices and breathing to get back into flow state. As a result of the headaches, I’m practicing a more energetic form of inner listening. I’ve been noticing my inner flow. I notice, too, when I feel badly, it prompts me to use ALL my tools, ALL of my resources — which often reminds me of how empowered I really am.

Which, to me, is the point – not the aside. The means IS the end, if you catch my drift. The journey is the destination.

Instead of: What could this symptom or discomfort mean?

The truer, kinder, saner question for many of us, might be: Can I just relax into this symptom, discomfort?

…After all, I would never have created the Divination Deck had my sensitivity buttons not been pushed so uncomfortably!

Yet sometimes my mind still fixates on fixing me! Pain does this. In an attempt to get out of the emergency state, the amygdala sends emergency “fix this” signals. Mind then regards symptoms as problems in need of fixing, and from that precarious state, it’s a very short jump to that panicked state: Something is wrong with me, or “I’m broken”.

That’s when I pull something from my let’s-confuse-my-amygdala bag of tricks, to help. Like this one:

When I get too caught up in trying to figure out now-what-in-the-fresh-hell-is-this-symptom-about ?*&!, I sometimes recall a passage I read in the book Souls on Earth. A man Soul-regressed and learned he had asthma from youth because he was the equivalent of a human radio transmitter for his home planet; every time Earth’s energies got too conflicted, his asthma would act up in order to send a signal back to his planet, so the beings there could offer us energetic help.

Ha! Maybe my physical symptoms MEAN something beyond what my human brain can even conceive! Maybe yours, too!