Opening Questions…
- How do you experience judgmental thinking in your life? What are some examples of judgments you’ve had or might regularly have?
- How do you approach problems in those times when you are feeling less well than you’d like? Is it important to you to find the “cure” or the “fix,” or to dwell for a time in the experience of the problem?
Dis-ease and Symptoms >>>
Imagine for a moment, if you would, the last time you felt sick or ill. What was it like for you? Perhaps you knew what it was (how to diagnose it): influenza, migraines, indigestion, sea sickness, food poisoning, vertigo, …
Recall a time, though, before you had a diagnosis for what you were experiencing, what that was like.
Maybe you had a headache, or an upset stomach, or blurred vision. Maybe it disturbed you not understanding what it was (to have a diagnosis), and you took it upon yourself to cycle through every possible thing it could be that you could think of, or perhaps ask others for their diagnostic guess of what it is.
Oftentimes, understanding versus not understanding the nature of our symptoms can make all the difference in our experience of what’s happening with us. And unfortunately, we may all the more often feel moved only to address the signs of our distress or discomfort (understood or not) than explore the root origins of our experience.
In fact, it is (currently) the common mainstay in our society to only address symptoms, even in a professional setting, without looking much further into the underlying causes.
In the case of an infection, we may experience a fever and be thereby advised to take ibuprofen or an acetaminophen to reduce the fever. The illness, however, isn’t the fever, it’s the infection, which can become health-threatening and dangerous without attention put to it.
Worse yet, not only does reducing a mild fever fail to address the root of concern, it may even exacerbate the condition. A fever is the body’s way of increasing blood flow and cuing immune system activity like white blood cells and other infection fighting agents. It takes a lot of energy to respond to viral or bacterial entities in the body, and supporting the course of a fever in its responding requires slowing down, eating less (to avoid any competition for energy resources that would be needed to digest heavier foods), and getting rest.
If one is in the habit of only recognizing and addressing symptoms of inner turmoil, and taking a pill or other “quick-fix” solution, rather than slowing down and spending the time and inner resources required for embracing the entirety of the underlying problem, then chances are that the majority of memories one has of illness and discomfort are difficult, drawn-out, and entirely undesirable.