I Declare Wellness!

Okay. I think it's safe to say that I am over the shingles, that plague which will never be mentioned again after these few final thoughts. It has been 29 days from the beginning until now.

It truly feels like a plague. As I told someone this morning, if I was a fundamentalist Christian, I would declare it as being of the devil.

But maybe not. Let's look at it from another angle.

Strange things passed through my mind over the past 29 days. For the most part, I believe illnesses communicate something to us. Perhaps I studied too much Louise Hay in the past but most illnesses can be traced to some condition in our lives that match the symptoms. Most people who read here have probably read enough of that kind of philosophy to know what I mean.

The only thing that makes sense for shingles is that it is a manifestation of the toxic "stuff" we carry around. Over the past several months, I've been letting go of quite a bit. It started in Thailand when I began the massages. It's continued with a commitment to deepening my practice of conscious forgiveness and "letting go".

Really though, considering the amount of crap I carried for so many years, it's not too surprising that I would create shingles.

The weekend I became ill, I'd just been to a meeting at the wat where a lot of toxic people stuff came to the surface. In-fighting among some of the members for reasons I can't discuss openly. People were engaging in political maneuvering that would have been more appropriate to a corporate boardroom rather than a sacred place (which I consider the wat to be). I was horribly disappointed. I was also kind of angry. "Kind of", no. I was pissed.

That's supposed to be a refuge, a sanctuary. That's the place where we go to strengthen our path, to receive guidance from the ajahns, to bring ourselves to wholeness.

The behavior out there reminded me of all the toxic stuff I've been carrying about work places and group dynamics in its worst manifestation, the competition and back-biting that represents the very worst of what I loosely call "western culture".

It felt like I'd gone swimming in a river of sh*t and there wasn't a shower hot enough to get clean again.

I came home that afternoon, a very hot afternoon, and even my house mate commented that I looked horribly tired. The right side of my face was red. I went into the bedroom and slept for two hours.

Two days later, I manifested the lesions.

Old, toxic stuff coming to the surface. Bubbling to the surface. Literally. That is what shingles look like. Bubbling. I know the medical explanation but nothing exists in a vacuum. Medical science would present it that way - but it's not the whole picture. At least for people my age, nearly all of us had chicken pox as kids. Not all of us get shingles.

I created the shingles. It didn't come out of nowhere and I don't believe in random chance. At the same time, it's important to mention that I don't assign fault or blame. It's just actions and reactions. There are some people who use this philosophy as a justification for self-righteous judgment and as a hammer against others who might not make the same choices they would make. I'm not going there at all. Anyone who would say that someone "chose" shingles or cancer and turned it into an indictment doesn't truly understand the nature of choice. Or of simple dialectics, for that matter.

Instead, I am saying that illnesses can tell us something about the state of our overall being, in all its facets. If we're getting migraines, why are we angry? If we have trouble breathing, what is it that keeps us from speaking our truth? If we have shingles, what are we holding onto that we need to release? These things provide us with information.

This is just another good reason to keep ourselves spiritually balanced, to keep our lives as "clean" as possible, to do our internal work and to increase our understanding of how everything links together.

(For anyone who is interested in reading more about this kind of thing, I'd recommend starting with Carolyn Myss.)

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