The Superpower of the Autoimmune Journey

When I got sick with Crohn's Disease at 7 years old after having intuited a deeply unhealthy unfolding within my environment, I did what most kids under the age of 10 years old do.  I saw the world around me and the players within my world as acting out in a way that was because of me.

We're all narcissists as children.  We believe the world literally revolves around us for a time and when something goes snakey in our environment, we will tell ourselves that it was our doing; our fault.

But let's take this a step further.  

When you're dealing with someone who is walking a karmic path whereby autoimmunity is the result, you're dealing with someone who is born highly sensitive, deeply empathic and acutely intuitive.  We literally absorb the environment around us and if we're young when the inevitable, karmic challenge walks in, what we absorb becomes our issue; our problem; our shame.

Add into the mix a deep need to put others first and to be peacekeepers. Now, we've got a real problem.  The problem then becomes that not only does the child turn her back on herself, she is now trying to soothe and calm the waters everywhere around her.

She's jumped ship. 

She's such a deep feeler that the intense emotions that she's feeling at such a young age overwhelm her.  She's not yet emotionally mature enough to self-soothe and self-honour so she jumps out of her own emotional body. But the emotions don't go anywhere.  

They will begin to take up space in the exact tissue or organ system that exemplifies our existential crisis.  

The bowels, in my case of Crohn's Disease, represent the ability to Let Go. The bowels represent what we digest (or not) in our lives and then our ability to let it go (or not).  Hashimotos, the autoimmune version of thyroid disease represents our ability to Speak Our Truth. The thyroid sits in the throat, after all. In seasonal allergies, which is also considered autoimmune, there is a believed need to defend against the very environment in which you live.  There is a deep mistrust of life.

Our karmic paths exist so that we can face and feel and deal with what we haven't yet been able to deal with; perhaps for lifetimes.  But more than anything, all of this is happening as an invitation to reinhabit the self; so that no matter what is going inside of us or outside of us, we won't run. We'll turn back towards ourselves and we'll stay.  No matter what is there or how gritty or upsetting the sensation, we stay.  

Imagine the signal that that sends the body.  It says, No matter what, sweetheart, I'll never abandon you again.

Cue the exhale.

At some point in adulthood, something will come along - a relationship, a loss, a challenge - that will trigger up the old, unmet trauma.  We won't understand why, all of a sudden, we want to jump ship again or why, in the case of autoimmunity, we simply want to run like hell away from our lives; ourselves.

And herein lies the greatest invitation you will ever receive.

While most human beings search their whole lives to come Home to themselves; to fully accept themselves and honour themselves, those of us with autoimmunity will be pushed (sometimes kicking and screaming) into turning back to the self and stepping back in.  

We've left ourselves defenceless for so long that we have nowhere to go but IN.  Like no one else can, we have the karmic opportunity to step back into ourselves, not in some attempt to fix what's broken or to make a deal that we can only do this once we're a little less messy, but to inhabit ALL of the brokenness, the messiness and the pain that exists there, now.

And here is the ultimate, game-changer.

If we gather up the courage to step back in, regardless of what we'll find, we may just come to see that nothing has ever, ever, ever been wrong.  How can this be, you ask?  After all, we've been sick and traumatized and hurting.  So, how?

When we see that every single experience that we've ever had that we've labeled 'a problem', has actually been a Divine Invitation to return to oneself, we flip the script on ourselves and open the door to Unconditional Love.

Unconditional Love is the loving and acceptance of oneself regardless of the condition you find yourself in.

This is what we've all been looking for our entire lives!  This is the homecoming of all homecomings.  It is what people who have had Near Death Experiences describe, time and again, when they visit the other side and come face to face to total and complete acceptance.

Imagine how our bodies respond when we step back and without trying to fix or change a damn thing, say, Ok...I'm here with you and it doesn't matter what I've told myself about my life, my body, my health, my relationships, my past, my transgressions, my shame, my guilt, my not-enoughness, my addictions, my sexuality, my femininity, my anything....I can accept you because we are NOT any of these 'things.'  We are having these experiences, but they are not who we are on a fundamental level.  These experiences are visitors that have come to teach us; bring us Home.  

Will you let them?

To your continued realization of the Divine Light that you always have been and always will be...

Much love,

Ann