Is a disease in your body talking to you?

We have an innate ability to be healthy, and the part of us that keeps our heart beating, our nails growing, our breath going in and out also knows to keep us healthy. It has the blueprint for the wholesome body we were born with. And when dis-ease settles in, it is more a problem of the conscious mind trying to cope with the real world, than the unconscious forgetting how to make us healthy. And yet, we don't believe we have this ability to remain healthy and to get back to a state of health once we are ill.

We do not appreciate the gift of health until after it has been taken away from us. Betty Edwards, in her book 'Drawing on the artist within', speaks about the way we are expected to learn to draw. "Why do we assume that a rare and special 'artistic' talent is required for drawing? We don't make that assumption about other kinds of abilities - reading, for example. What if we believed that only those fortunate enough to have an innate, God-given, genetic gift for reading will be able to learn to read? What if teachers believed that the best way to go about the teaching of reading materials for children to handle and manipulate and then wait and see what happens?

Just be free. Use your imagination. Just do what comes into your head. Reading should be fun!' It's easy to see that if it were the situation in reading classes, probably only one or two or perhaps three children in a class of twenty might somehow manage to learn how to read. They would be designated talented for reading, and no doubt someone would say, 'well, you know, Sally's grandmother was good at reading. Sally probably got it from her.' Or 'Oh, yes, Billy is good at reading. The family is quite literate, you know. It's in the genes, I guess.' A comparable situation might be to enroll in a beginning French conversation class and to be told at the start, 'Go ahead and talk in French,' with an implied warning that if you couldn't already speak French, you shouldn't bother to stay.' And yet, we seem to believe that health is inborn. You either have it or you don't. it runs in the family. I have my family's genes, so I will inherit the family's tendency for ... put your family's disease here: heart attack, cancer, leukemia, asthma...

Exultant health is not something that we are taught, it is something innate. And yet, is it? Anyone can have cancer, asthma, acne, a weak heart. Some people recover from their conditions, and others die. Why? Are there in fact some skills that we can acquire, like in drawing, a way to see differently, techniques to draw on a different part of our brain to reclaim our health like other people with no artistic abilities reclaim their talent in a matter of a few short weeks.

There are a lot of books on self-help, meditation, visualization, to help you heal and go beyond traditional medicine and aggressive drugs. And yet, aren't these books saying also: Just be free. Use your imagination. Just do what comes into your head. Reading should be fun! Or healing should be fun. Yet, there are no specific techniques offered, and they look at the symptoms, but very few of them look at the cause of the disease.

So what really causes dis-ease? Is it the messages of the body ignored for too long? Is it an inability to cope with what throws at us that eventually undermines our foundation, because we do not take the time or do not have the inner strength to confront our fears and limitations?