Of course this is happening right now
I am lying on my couch with a cough drop rolling around in my mouth. Around me are haphazardly packed open cardboard boxes, plastic totes waiting to be filled and taken to the storage unit. I am in the middle of a move and I am sick again for what feels like the fifth out of the last six weeks.
I am in the midst of a massive life change. Half of my belongings are going in storage, another quarter into our off-grid cabin where we are moving in just a few short weeks and the other quarter in a studio/shed that has yet to be insulated and heated. The changes ahead are ones I feel excited for, concerned about, and my mind feels like it has been buzzing with plans and worries for about the last six months.
So of course as the time to pack and organize and move came up, all of my chronic symptoms started to rear their ugly heads. Endometriosis pain, old nerve pain that I have had flare-ups from since I was eighteen, chronic fatigue, skin symptoms, you name it. As a human, I was annoyed. As a homeopath, I was not surprised by this in the least bit. But when a fever crept in stealthily on Monday evening, man, was I mad. Because, seriously? I can’t seem to catch a break, and I certainly don’t have time to be sick with our move-out date quickly approaching. Lately, I have a few days where I feel good, and then bam, something happens and I’m down for the count again. When that fever set up camp in my body on Tuesday and I was wracked with chills, body aches and delirium, I finally surrendered. I let myself steep in the overwhelm and then let the fever do its thing while I took hot epsom salt baths to get my temperature up, and took my Eupatorium perfoliatum for those horrendous deep bone aches and to help me move through my fever naturally. I felt barely conscious but I also felt my body fully relax. There was nothing to be done about this fever but ride it out.
Before I move into my deeper understanding of acute illness and flareups I think it’s important to say this: it is normal to feel resistance when we’re in pain, or to think the worst. To panic or get mad about being sick when there is so much going on. It can feel discouraging when old symptoms rear their ugly heads. Feel all of it. Get mad, scream into a pillow, be in the despair, and when you’ve said yes to it, say yes to it again until you’ve wrung out all the feelings about being sick. We’re allowed to have emotions when our bodies do things we can’t control.
It’s frustrating and it’s important to acknowledge the emotions that arise when we’re uncomfortable rather than try to override them with positivity or forcing ourselves to be okay with it — the feelings will come out someway anyway, might as well spend a little time with them.
I want to draw some awareness around what seems to be happening here on a deeper level, because I think it’s important to talk about when it comes to “dis-ease” and the inconvenience of it all. There is a reason that my response to being sick at the worst time was “of course this is happening right now.”
Because change stirs up our inner content.
Six months ago, Spencer and I encountered the rather abrupt realization that we really needed to get out of our lease. The whole thing was unexpected but the answer was clear, we need to find a new place to live. Because this wasn’t something we were expecting to have to deal with, it totally threw us. But that was when a shift started to happen for me, and my body responded in a way I did not expect at all — I got extremely tired.
At the time, it was the weirdest thing. Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough sleep. I was mentally wired during the day but once my head hit the pillow, I was out for hours and hours. This went on for months.
Then as we got closer to making plans for our move, old symptoms started to flare. Pain, more fatigue, weakness. I observed the events in my life, the mounting pressure of leaving our home, the feeling of instability, and suddenly I am having flashbacks to other transitions I went through as a child. Old stories suddenly living right here and right now. My body triggered into an immune response that I first experienced when I was very little. Suddenly I could map it all out. I could see the thread that ran through my whole life, a story that has always lived in my body, narrated loud and clear.
Through the eyes of this healing art, we look at these events as an opportunity to heal. When an old story is present and the body responds the way it did when we didn’t have the resources or the support we needed to process at the time, we are looking at evidence of a pattern that is saying “it is time to look at this more closely.”
In Homeopathy we may give a new remedy to help us process that old experience in a healthier way, or we might return to a previous remedy if this is something we’ve encountered before. This opens a doorway to a deeper realm of our sacred inner experience. We then ask curiously and compassionately, “What did I need then that I couldn’t get?” Here we often encounter unexpressed grief, anger, resentment, fear, a boundary that was crossed. For me, it was a need that wasn’t met. It was a new environment that didn’t feel safe. My body responded by collapsing. It responded that way when I was small, and it is doing that again now.
An old symptom will flare in response to a trigger — life change, stress, inability to tend to our needs when they arise — we react to this emotionally through resistance or surrender. When we get curious about it, or we ask “when was the first time I experienced this symptom or feeling?” we might get more emotional feedback from our bodies. Emotions rise to the surface. When we give that experience all our attention, we feel it, we move through it, we understand it, we do our best to meet that need within ourselves. More often than not, it is followed by a physical healing response. Sometimes it’s a cold, sometimes a fever, sometimes women will start their period, skin symptoms may flare.
This is the body’s way of carrying that energy OUT of the body. A natural system of disposal. We sweat, we bleed, our bowels empty, we blow our noses, we cough up mucus, we notice our skin breaking out. It may be inconvenient or uncomfortable, but it’s an integral part of how our bodies release what no longer serves us. When we allow for this, we often come out on the other side feeling better than before. The beauty the homeopathic process and working with a practitioner is we have an unbiased witness help guide us through, and we have homeopathic remedies to help us move through it easier and with better awareness of and compassion for ourselves.
I would love to work with you.
It is an honor to witness the growth and healing of the human spirit. The journey through our layers of wounding and back to self is a sacred and personal one that I find is best supported through compassionate witnessing and partnership. If this article has piqued your curiosity, I would love to help you take your next step. I offer Discovery Calls for anyone curious about this journey. Or you can email me at katie@katiebrommehomeopathy.com!