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The Infinite Meaning of Symptoms
I listen carefully to your hurts,
complaints, problems and symptoms. I listen to the attempts you have made to correct your problems and to self-medicate your
symptoms. It is our general human assumption that symptoms are meaningless, irritating, unfair or frightening. Usually people
come to counseling or go to a doctor to treat their symptoms. A symptom can be physical, mental, emotional, or social. A symptom
is usually considered to be a sign of something wrong. In spiritual psychotherapy it is agreed that a symptom is a sign of
something wrong, but a far greater sign of something that is right that has not been recognized. A symptom is a signal of
ignored potentiality, lost ability, hidden power, an unrecognized gift. All symptoms are signals of our mis-understood spirituality.
You are a spiritual being and there is nothing you can do about it, except to symptomatize or to enter into the depth meaning
of your symptom, which is your spirituality. Spirituality is invisible and it is easy to overlook it. The only way that you
can see your spirituality is in the mirror of the landscape of your life. Your body, your relationships, and your world in
general is that mirror which reflects to you the condition of your spirituality recognition.
Let’s make a list of some common
symptoms
Fear, jealousy, guilt, grief, anger, boredom, stress,
depression, anxiety, arguing, flunking a class at school, getting demoted at work, an affair, authority problems, power struggles,
health problems, financial problems, legal problems, verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse, the victim
or villain experience, communication difficulties, loneliness, losing a job, being broke, panic attacks, frustration, low
self-esteem, submission or dominance, obsessive- compulsiveness, manipulation, lying, pornography, addictions, approval seeking,
people-pleasing, the security-search, cynicism, passive-aggressiveness, win-lose games, greed, self-sacrifice, consumerism,
fault-finding, gossip, etc.
Symptoms cover the entire waterfront from headaches to war.
All symptoms have an element of war-likeness in them, an element of conflict and struggle. I trace the source of human suffering
and symptomatology to three irreducible beliefs:
- The first major cause of human suffering and human symptoms
is the belief in separation, which is experienced as abandonment, rejection, loneliness, alienation, boredom 2.The second major cause of pain and symptoms is the belief in lack, which is experienced as deprivation,
not having or being enough, inadequacy, and the search for more. 3.The third major cause
of stressful symptoms is the belief in entrapment, which is experienced as being trapped, enslaved, stuck, helpless, hopeless,
and victimized.
These three causes can be reduced even further to one major
source, our story. Our story is a carefully woven plot which hangs on the three beliefs in separation, lack and entrapment.
This story is best characterized as a victim story. Even though a person may sometimes play villain and sometimes plays rescuer,
all human stories are essentially victim stories, and eventually produce our symptomatology.
The discrepancy between "who we really are" and
"who our story says we are" is what produces our symptoms and victim experiences. You can begin to re-vision your symptom
as a messenger from God, a gift of the Spirit, a wake-up call from your Self to yourself. If you choose to ignore, resist
or anesthetize your symptom, it will only go only further underground, regain force and later appear
in a more drastic manner. Will you continue to be-head the messenger, anesthetize the positive meaning of your pain, reject
the gift of your symptom, and remain asleep to your true nature?
You are fortunate at this time to be seeking psychotherapy through
which you can investigate the life-liberating meaning of your symptom rather than remaining adversarial with it. You do not
want to play any more games that you will lose. If you try to ignore your symptom, anesthetize it, or blame it on someone
else, you will lose. All of your losses so far have come because you did not know that your troubles have any ultimate meaning
about yourself. You did not know that conflicts and disagreements with others are a potential gift to yourself. That gift
is the realization that your story is not you. Your story about yourself is not who you are and your judgments about others
is not who they are either.
Paradoxical shock therapy does not condone or condemn the story
and has nothing to do with our self-blaming or other-blaming kinds of irresponsibility. It only has to do with awareness and
self-realization. You do not have to change any external circumstances right now, you only have to examine your thinking (cognitive
distortions).
In fact it might be wise to focus on exactly what your story
is. We have been focusing on changing circumstances and other people for aeons, and we have only become more frustrated. Spiritual
psychotherapy is not an attempt to fix you, but it is an attempt to challenge you to awaken from your dreams and nightmares
to your reality, to the awareness that you are health, happiness, peace, power, freedom, music, poetry, truth and love.
Whenever you are anxious or upset, you have been hooked and deceived by your story. All self-defense is story-oriented. When
you can state the following sentence to yourself with understanding and conviction, you are well on your way to inner self-renewal:
I am an Infinite spiritual being,
an amateur god, hidden in a self-limited human personality and physical body story,
where I actively investigate and welcome with gratitude the meaning of any stresses and symptoms necessary to awaken me and
keep me aware of the truth of the Infinite Christ power in us all
The problem with our story is that we believe it is our security,
but the fact is just the opposite. The tighter we cling to our story, the more persistent our various symptoms will become.
The symptom is the price you pay for unconsciously clinging to your script. It is not only the story about ourselves that
must be corrected, but also our views of others and the universe as well. We are intelligent, caring, infinite beings, but
our unconscious beliefs make us do stupid things. The essence of responsibility is to see why we do foolish things and to
correct our misbehavior at its root rather than to just smooth it over so as to look good.
And so spiritual psychotherapy is not an attempt to teach you
something you do not already know, but to remind you of what you have forgotten. The end point of this re-membering is that
God is everything, not only our source and destiny, but the contents of our experience as well. There is only one of us. All
of the rest is illusion, story, drama, games and suffering.
I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you
in at Heaven’s Gate, Built into Jerusalem’s wall
William Blake
If you believe that everything happens for a reason, you can
pick up the string of your symptom and wind it up as you follow it out of the cave of the darkness of your present crisis
into the light. The string is your fear that you may lose what you have or not get what you want. The belief in that fear
can be investigated and challenged until you find the truth blocked by your story, which is that you cannot lose what you
are, and that you already are what you have always wanted.
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