For the past couple of weeks I have been hampered by a sharp pain on my lower back, most likely resulting from a pinching of the sciatic nerve. I am very often seated cross-legged in the floor as part of my work and so I often have a build up of stress and tension in my lower back. I practice yoga, and exercise regularly which helps to manage it.
This time however, it was much more severe. I decided to work with it and see why it was suddenly so prominent. What came up surprised me. I share this with you because it illustrates very well how our ingrained beliefs can affect our health.
Last month I turned forty. No big deal. Or so I thought. Little did I know that my body was having thoughts of its own. I suddenly had the desire to go to the doctor to get a complete medical check up. I was concerned that now having turned forty my ‘strange things’ will start happening to my body and so I should get regular checkups. Unbidden, flashes of conversation with various people started surfacing in my mind, all around the theme of how the body starts deteriorating when you turn forty. I was buying into it and I did not know it.
Now, I am not decrying people’s experiences here of what happened to them when they crossed the forty mark. It’s just that some people continue to look and feel great well after, and some just don’t. So there must be something else at work here rather than just genetics. In fact, all cellular biologists, and geneticists will tell you that when cells replicate themselves, they usually make a perfectly healthy copy of themselves, and they have built in error correction mechanisms. This process is natural unless something gets in the way. Something like stress, which can cause cancer.
Hmmm… If stress causes cancer then what about our beliefs about ourselves? Can we physically affect our cells and DNA? Actually we can. Just research the works of Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Peter Gariev, or Professor Fritz Popp. In my article on The Chakras I examine this mechanism of interaction between mind and body through DNA.
The past couple of days has seen me practicing yoga in the morning with the express intent of healing and realigning the sciatic nerve injury. I spontaneously connected this morning with my body cells to find them quite confused. They were literally wondering if they had to ‘slow down’ now that I had turned forty. They couldn’t fathom why.
As weird as this may sound, recall that there is Divine Consciousness in everything. Even as various cells make up our organs, which in turn make up our bodies, so too we as individuals can be likened onto the cells of the Cosmic Person. The Purush Suktam of the Rig Veda says for instance, “The Brahmanas are His mouth, the Kshatriyas His arms, the Vaishyas His torso, and the Sudras His legs.”
This experience has really brought home to me just how much our beliefs influence our health. It is a classic example of how we can allow the thoughts and beliefs of people to condition us in subtle ways. No doubt there may be other factors at play here. But the Law of Attraction dictates that what we resonate with is what we will experience. So drawing the experience of those factors to us in the first place presupposes a consciousness in us that seeded the experiences. Once we can identify and change those beliefs, we can heal ourselves. Celebrated author Louis Hay has done a lifetime of work in this arena, showing us that by changing our beliefs we can change ourselves.
Mainstream science is catching up to this now. In this medical article by Dr. Stephen Hochschuler, psychological treatment for self-defeating behaviours are given as one remedy for healing sciatic nerve injury.
What is the outcome of all of this, you may ask? Well, the pain has greatly subsided now. There is now a barely noticeable soreness in the area. I will continue to monitor myself for any self-defeating beliefs that I still carry with me.
Postscript:
In my last post, Physician Heal Thyself, I spoke of calling upon my Spirit team to assist in the healing of my pinched sciatic nerve. This post is an add-on to that one where I share with you a most interesting experience- that of being lovingly scolded by Spirit and confirmation of the experience. This was definitely a first for me. I did not want to include this bit in the last post to take away from the essence of the message- our beliefs shape our reality.
Bird-dog pose
This event took place a few days ago after I had finished my morning’s yoga practice and was lying in corpse-pose, shavasana. I invited my Spirit team to work with me in healing and just lay there, observing the flow of energies which they directed to me. My legs started spasming as they unblocked my feet chakras and allowed the prana, chi, or ki, energy to once again flow freely.
Finding the process was taking a bit long, I decided to replicate my energies in spirit and move unto other things physically. So I basically told my Spirit team to continue working with me in Spirit while I got up and about to the rest of my day. As I made a move to get up I was sternly yet lovingly told to stay down! They weren’t finished yet!
They showed me a mental image of me on all fours, stretching my leg straight out behind me (see the graphic above). It was an unusual position, one that I don’t do although I am aware of the stretch. So I obliged, feeling the relevant muscles relaxing and contracting. It worked.
Up until this time I had no idea that the pain was from the sciatic nerve. The confirmation came a few days after when I read this medical article by Dr. Stephen Hochschuler who gave that exact same stretch as a remedy for sciatic nerve pain! I only had to smile and give thanks to my Spirit team. All of these years of doing spiritual work, and I still love getting confirmations. Thank you, God!